We have a simple mission. To make the very best quality everyday clothing; to make it from the very best natural materials in the very best factories right here in the UK; and to sell it at great prices that everyone can afford 365 days a year.
How can the highest quality UK made clothing be affordable? Well simply by sticking to what’s important and cutting out all the unnecessary stuff. Most other brands spend fortunes designing and launching endless streams of new products and fortunes convincing you to buy them. We don’t do any of that. Instead we spend our money making the best clothes we can and we let the quality speak for itself.
And buying from Community Clothing isn’t just great for your wallet, it’s better for the planet, and it’s great for the brilliant British factories we work with and the fantastic local communities they support.
People are often amazed to discover that most premium clothing brands mark up their prices about five times or more. So a sock that costs £3 to make will retail for around £15.
At Community Clothing we do things differently. Our unique business model cuts out most of the usual cost of designing and selling clothes. Our mark-ups are typically a third of other brands, meaning our prices are too. We will sell you that same great quality sock that costs £3 to make for under £5. We apply that same great value pricing model to everything we sell. Our £70 jumpers would be over £200 from other brands, our £20 t shirts over £60.
No frills, no fuss, no fancy marketing, just great everyday clothing, made here in the UK, at surprisingly affordable prices.
Shop Our Fantastic Everyday Clothing
To achieve the goal of 100% UK production from sustainable materials at affordable prices we had to create a business model that was radically different from the one used by the rest of the fashion and clothing industry. Here’s how that model works.
At Community Clothing we make the everyday clothes that everybody has in their wardrobes; the classics, the staples, the basics, whatever you wish to call them.
We design and engineer the very best version of every single garment we sell; best design, best fit, best manufacturing quality. And then we make it in exactly the same way time after time. The same natural raw materials from the same farms, produced by the same spinners, weavers, dyers, knitters and garment makers, because that is the only way to ensure exceptional quality. At Community Clothing, the socks you buy from us this year will be the same socks as the ones you bought from us last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.
And this consistency of design isn’t just great for you, it's also great for the fantastic UK factories we work with. We work closely with our long-term partner factories to design products that are simple and efficient for them to make, meaning highest quality and lowest cost. We always design our clothes with simplicity in mind, we add no unnecessary features which add to the cost and we try to use the fewest different fabrics across our product ranges. All of this means our business is efficient and easy to manage.
And because we don’t change our clothes from season to season, we never waste any fabric or trims. It also means our fabrics and our clothes can be made at any time during the year, which is great for all of our suppliers.
Other brands waste tens, if not hundreds of millions of pounds each year designing and launching new products. They waste millions of pounds in unused fabrics, and they end up with millions of unsold garments each season and waste more money disposing of in landfill or incinerating. Our model avoids all of that.
But this consistent approach doesn’t mean we stand still. Far from it. We are always looking for ways to make our product better. Can we improve its lifespan, can we reduce its environmental footprint, can we work with our partner factories so that more of our supply chain is local to the point of consumption? Can we go right back to the soil, growing the fibers we need, regeneratively, right here in the UK?
No seasonal collections, no weekly drops, no must have items. Just great everyday clothes, at great everyday prices, every time.
You might be surprised to learn that with most fashion brands 20% or more of the price you pay goes on marketing and advertising. We don’t think this is the right way to offer you good value. If you make a really good product why do you need to spend all that money getting people to buy it? At Community Clothing our marketing spend never been over 5% (and in most years it has been a lot less).
Most of the people you see in our images are not professional models, they’re lovely people from the communities where our partner factories are located. We shoot in studios and locations in and around those very same communities, with local photographers, not in expensive sunny locations overseas. Our models mostly do their own hair and make up on our shoots, and we don’t retouch the images because that’s expensive and we prefer our images to be honest and real.
Every advert you see on Facebook or Instagram is written by us, not by a highly paid advertising agency. Because who knows our story better than we do? Who wrote these words you are reading right now? We did of course.
We’ve never paid an influencer, or gifted clothing to a celebrity.
We believe our money is better spent making fantastic clothing and letting the quality of that clothing speak for itself.
At Community Clothing you will never see our products on sale, not on Black Friday, or Boxing Day or ever. Instead of over-inflating our prices and then discounting we chose to sell our clothes at the very best price we can every single day of the year. Other fashion and clothing businesses need those sales and discounts to clear out perfectly good stock to make way for the constant merry-go-round of new stuff. People are often horrified to learn that around 30% of all the clothing that is made is never sold. Last year the fashion world produced over a billion garments, so that’s 300 million garments that were made that nobody wanted. That’s 300 millions garments worth of wasted energy and resources and pollution the world didn’t need. And all of these sales and discounts con us into buying lots of clothes we just don’t need. In the UK we only wear 28% of the clothes in our wardrobes. They’re full of clothing we never wear. We waste money buying them, we waste money storing them and we waste time and effort disposing of them.
Our Seasonless Staples model means we never need to get rid of surplus stock, the same great product we’re selling this season will be the product we’re selling next season, and the season after that. And because there are no discounts to tempt you, you only buy what you need, when you need it. So no over-production, no overconsumption, just great clothes at a great value price whenever you need them.
Even the best UK factories have significant spare capacity between the traditional fashion seasons. Our innovative seasonless model means factories can make for us year-round, including in those traditional off-peak periods when they have the most spare capacity. This works for our partner factories, maximising their utilisation and significantly lowering their costs. And it works for you, the consumers, meaning exceptional quality British made products at fantastic prices.
Our growing business is creating a positive cycle of rising investment, rising employment and rising efficiency delivering better wages for workers, greater economic stability for factories and the communities they support, and more great products at affordable prices for you.
Our philosophy on manufacturing is simple. We work with one great UK factory for each product or material that we use. All are specialists in their given field; spinners, weavers, knitters, dyers, finishers, embroiderers, textile printers and garment makers. Many of these factories are family owned (one is in its seventh generation), and most are well over a century in existence, the oldest dating back to 1776. All are businesses with deep roots in their communities, and all have fantastic dedicated and highly skilled staff, many with a lifetime of service.
We work with them in long-term mutually beneficial partnerships. By doing so we give them the confidence to grow their workforces and invest in training and equipment, starting a positive cycle of rising efficiency, lower prices, rising volumes and rising employment and investment. Our goal is to help all of our partner factories become state-of-the-art manufacturers with best-in-class work-forces.
Working in stable partnerships with British based suppliers dramatically reduces the costs of sourcing and supply chain management. More than a dozen of our suppliers are with an hour of our Lancashire head office by public transport. Compare this to brands flying staff thousands of miles around the planet each year. It’s not just easier and more cost effective, it significantly reduces our carbon footprint. Local garment production means minimised monetary costs and carbon costs for transport of goods, and it helps to create a growing local skills base for garment repair and aftercare which is vitally important.
Local supply chains mean:
Today we work with 38 UK partner factories, one specialist for each part of our supply chain. Our partner factories are located in 28 communities across the UK, predominantly in the North West of England, Yorkshire, the East Midlands and the south of Scotland, but we have suppliers right across the UK. Many are in areas of severe economic and social deprivation where the jobs they support are vital to the communities that surround them.
Our operational model is designed from the ground up for total simplicity and efficiency
All of this means that our overheads are a small fraction of those of the rest of the clothing industry. People are often appalled to learn that the fashion industry works on standard mark-ups of between 5 and 6 time the manufacturing cost. At Community Clothing our standard mark-up is between 1.5 and 1.7. Put another way, out of every pound you spend with us nearly 65p is spent on making the product, whereas its less than 25p with other clothing brands. Which explains why, pound for pound, the quality of our clothing is about three times better.
We’re incredibly proud of the product we make, and incredibly proud of the way in which we go about doing it. We are confident that there is no other brand on earth selling clothing this good, with this level of honesty and transparency, at anything like our prices.
And the work we are doing is having the positive impact we desired. The factories we are working with are seeing a much brighter future. They are hiring and training staff, they’re investing in new technology and equipment, and they’re paying higher wages. So far we’ve created over 200,000 hours of skilled work in UK factories, that’s the equivalent of well over 100 years of full time employment. And we’ve only just begun. With your help we think we can create thousands of fulfilling, rewarding full-time jobs.
Community Clothing was founded by Patrick Grant, award winning clothing designer and judge on BBC One’s The Great British Sewing Bee. To learn more about Patrick click here.
