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We set out to build a clothing brand that only does good.
Our mission is simple:
Create and sustain lots of skilled jobs here in the UK’s textile manufacturing regions
Make fantastic quality clothes
To achieve the goals we set ourselves we’ve gone right back to the drawing board and built a business model that allows us to make the best quality clothes, in fantastic UK factories, from the finest natural materials, and still sell them at prices that are comparable with the UK High Street, prices we hope most people can afford.
We’ve done it by thinking about every part of our business, what’s needed, and what’s not needed, leading to a model that in almost every way possible is different from other clothing brands.
We set out to build a clothing brand that only does good.
Our mission is simple:
Create and sustain lots of skilled jobs here in the UK’s textile manufacturing regions
Make fantastic quality clothes
To achieve the goals we set ourselves we’ve gone right back to the drawing board and built a business model that allows us to make the best quality clothes, in fantastic UK factories, from the finest natural materials, and still sell them at prices that are comparable with the UK High Street, prices we hope most people can afford.
We’ve done it by thinking about every part of our business, what’s needed, and what’s not needed, leading to a model that in almost every way possible is different from other clothing brands.
At Community Clothing we believe in simplicity. Only the clothing you need with no extraneous details. And only the business operation needed to deliver it. We cut out all the costly and unnecessary bits and focus on what we think is the important stuff; making really good clothes. Because we think that if you make a good product the quality should speak for itself.
We believe that if you buy an item of clothing then you should be paying for the clothing; for the materials it’s made from, and for the skill of the person who has made it. So we built a radically different business model that cuts out all of the usual costs of selling clothes. We keep things simple.
A simple design philosophy based on brilliant seasonless basics radically reduces design and development costs, ecommerce costs and lots more costs besides.
Our simple one-partner-factory-per-product approach, all on our doorstep, radically reduces supply chain costs.
Simple honest no-frills marketing radically reduces marketing costs. We don’t pay people to tell you how good they are. We let our products do the talking.
And our direct-to-consumer online model radically reduces retail costs.
When you buy from us, you’re paying for the product, and almost nothing else.
Constantly designing, developing, sourcing and launching thousands of new styles is a huge cost. Our seasonless basics model removes this cost and ensures maximum quality, minimum price and zero waste.
Staples, classics, basics, whatever you want to call them we make the everyday clothes that form the foundation of most people’s everyday wardrobes. The jumpers and t shirts and sweatshirts and jeans you keep and wear for decades, often lifetimes.
No one today that makes good quality affordable basics. No one. You can have good quality. Or you can have affordable. But the affordable stuff is TERRIBLE; cheaply made from nasty cheap materials.
Everyone should be able to afford good quality clothes that don’t harm the planet. So that’s what we do. Our clothes are great quality AND affordable.
We design and engineer the very best version of every single garment we sell, we design great looking clothes but we also design for comfort, function, and a long life. We fit, test, review, refine, and repeat until we think we have it right. Sometimes developments can take years. And then when it’s right 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, its 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, we try and use the fewest different fabrics across our product ranges, all of this meaning our business is efficient and easy to manage.
And because we don’t change our clothes from season-to-season we never any 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 which they waste more money disposing of in landfill or incinerating. Just imagine the cost of developing thousands of new products a month like some fast fashion brands do. Imagine how much testing they do (it’s not a lot). 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 fibres 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.
We make clothes that really last, that are durable and actually get better with age, clothes that you want to keep and wear we hope for decades.
We use materials that won’t quickly wear out. We use materials that we know the provenance of, that we’ve tested and worn for years. We know they’re good. We source them from manufacturers who in many cases have centuries of experience making one thing and making it well.
Making good materials is difficult and expensive. You need to start with great raw materials, and our yarn spinners are experts in sourcing the right raw fibres for the job. Consistency is important so they use the same fibres, grown or raised on the same farms year after year. It then means spinning the best quality yarn, and our spinners are the best in the business. They spin yarns for some the best-known luxury brands on the planet and have centuries of experience and accumulated skill and knowledge in the workforces. And it’s the same with our weavers and our knitters who produce our fabrics great skill and care.
And then these fabrics need to be cut with precisions and sewn in a way that means the clothing is robust. That means felled seams on trouser legs and dresses, rivets on jeans, topstitching on sweatshirts. All of this high quality sewing is expensive and time consuming. In fact it can take almost twice as long to sew clothes this way, but we do it because we believe every garment should be made well. Its why we are confident to say that we don’t think you can buy clothes as good as ours for even twice the price.
But it’s no good making clothes that last for ages if you’re trying to sell people new ones every week. We don’t chase trends, we offer great clothes with enduring style, we design every piece with a view to it having a minimum 20 year lifespan. We don’t have sales to lure you into buying things you don’t need. Many brands which claim to be sustainable launch hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of new styles every week. Even if their clothes were made sustainably (they’re not) selling you clothes you don’t need is the opposite of sustainable. But they’re finding it a hard habit to break.
We also encourage second hand clothing sales and are trialling our own second-hand shops with a view to brining this in as a permanent part of our business. We encourage repair, and reclamation of fabrics for re-use.
Local is good. Local means transparency and traceability, it means minimum environmental impact, maximum sustainability.
Local is good, partly because we like the folk we work with. They really are the salt of the earth. And they and the communities they’re part of have had a tough run and they deserve a leg up.
But also making here means we can be certain of exactly who is doing what in our supply chain, and that we are making our products sustainably. We inspect factories, check fire escape, check wage slips and employment contracts, check that the kettles work and that there are plenty of tea bags in the canteen (most important). We can check that they are following the extremely tough environmental standards required here in the UK. Supply chains in the fashion world are murky businesses. Many brands couldn’t tell you hand on heart where their products are made, not every step. And if that’s the case, how do you know how they’re making your product?
And we go much further. We aim to keep everything else we do local too. Wherever possible we work with service providers and suppliers who are based in the towns where we make our clothes. We use local label suppliers, local packaging suppliers, we use local people as our ‘models’, we use local photographers and photography studios, local graphic design agencies, local printers, local everything. It’s about putting the greatest amount of economic benefit into the communities in which we work.
Local supply chains mean:
We think we have the most environmentally sustainable production route on earth. Made from the lowest impact sustainable natural materials, made under the toughest environmental standard, made using the cleanest anergy, and made where its sold reducing transport pollution. And of course, every single garment is made to last, further reducing the environmental impact.
Our entire business, and every single product we sell, is as sustainable and conscious as it is possible to be.
Our philosophy on manufacturing is simple. We work with one UK based factory for each step of production, working in stable long-term mutually beneficial partnerships. This minimises cost and maximises quality.
Today we work with 42 UK partner factories, located in 35 communities across the UK, all specialists in their given field; spinners, weavers, knitters, dyers, finishers, embroiderers, textile printers and garment makers, all with a reputation for exceptional quality.
Many of these factories are family owned and most have long histories, the oldest dating back to 1776. all have fantastic dedicated and highly skilled staff, many with a lifetime of service.
All are businesses with deep roots in their communities, and
Many are located in regions of severe economic and social deprivation where the jobs they support are vital to the communities that surround them.
Our manufacturing partners are great employers who share our deep commitment to the highest employment standards, who value their staff and work hard to look after them.
We work with them in long term mutually beneficial partnerships, giving them the confidence to and invest in training and equipment, and in growing their workforces, helping them to think long-term.
Our goal is to help all of our partner factories become state-of-the-art manufacturers and employers, to be places young people grow up wanting to work, and to play a positive role in shaping their communities as they have done for generations.
By working together we both enjoy the economies of scale and efficiency that long-run product manufacture brings. It also means that if things go wrong, which they sometimes do, we can remedy things quickly.
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 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.
Our entire philosophy is about keeping things simple, minimising costs and environmental impact, and maximising quality.
Our seasonless basics model means our factories can make our clothes in what would normally be there quiet period, meaning they can keep their production lines running at full capacity year-round, dramatically improving efficiency and lowering costs.
Manufacturing is hard. You need to manage quality, efficiency, innovation, staff ups and downs, your supply chain, the crazy rises in energy costs. Its really tough, and only the best survive.
On top of all of that even the very best British textile and garment factories have downtime between the traditional fashion seasons, some of it significant, and this can be financially crippling.
Because we’re not tied to launching new products at the traditional starts of the fashion seasons our factories can make product for us when it works for them, which is in the usually quiet periods between these seasons. We place large rolling orders up to a full year in advance which gives total flexibility to our partner factories, meaning they can keep their production lines running at full capacity all year round.
This is fantastic for the factories – it dramatically improves efficiency and massively lowers cost. And it is great for our customers – they get amazing quality at the lowest possible prices. And as Community Clothing grows our partner factories grow, because they know we are with them for the long term, creating a further positive cycle of rising investment, rising employment and rising efficiency, delivering better wages for workers, greater economic stability for the manufacturers and the communities they support, and great products at affordable prices for you.
It’s a big old win for everyone.
Many clothing brands spend far more money on marketing and selling their products than they spend on making them. We think this is crazy. We spend our money making the best clothes we can and let the quality speak for itself.
You might be surprised to learn that many fashion brands spend at least 20% of their turnover on marketing and advertising. Expensive models, expensive photographers, expensive locations, and expensive post-production because making average clothes looks good is really hard. And then they have to pay celebrities and influencers to say they love the clothes. Their fees would shock you. A very well-known UK High St brand recently paid one influencer the best part of £20 million to promote a range.
We don’t do any of that. We think spending those kinds of sums is crazy. And if you make a really good product it shouldn’t be necessary.
Many 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 and created 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 believe our money is better spent making fantastic clothing and letting the quality of that clothing speak for itself.
At Community Clothing we don’t ever have a sale. No Black Friday, no Boxing Day, not ever.
Adding huge mark-ups then constantly reducing prices through offers and sales is wrong. It drives needless consumption. But it is a necessity for most fashion and clothing businesses who need sales to clear out perfectly good stock to make way for the constant merry-go-round of new stuff. And its all priced into their model. People are often surprised to discover that these fashion brands are still making a profit on their garments even at 70% off.
You might also be horrified to learn that around 30% of all the clothing that is made is never sold. Last year the fashion world produced over 100 billion garments, so that’s 30 billion garments that were made that nobody wanted. 30 billion garments worth of wasted energy and resources and pollution the world didn’t need.
And all of these sales lure us into buying lots of clothes we really don’t need. In the UK we only wear between 30% and 35% 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.
Instead of over-inflating our prices and then discounting we sell our clothes at the very best price we can every single day of the year. 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.
No over-production, no overconsumption, just great clothes at a great value price every day.
We make 100% of our clothes right here in the UK, and over 80% of the materials we use are made here too. But we’d like to go further. We’d like to make 100% of our supply chain local to the point of production.
It’s our long term aim to procure everything we need, fabrics, zips, buttons the lot, from within the communities in which we work and we’re working to try and make this a reality, but right now some of the things we use are simply no longer made here in the UK. As our orders increase in size so we can work with our manufacturing partners to restart production of those missing pieces.
Success for us means brining 100% of our supply chain local to the point of use.
There are lots of brands that make great quality clothing, what’s so different about Community Clothing. Simple. The price. We charge about a third of other premium brands for the same quality of clothing.
We’re confident you won’t find clothes as good as ours at even twice the price. That’s because of our unique pricing model. We cut out all the usual costs of designing and selling clothes, meaning we don’t need to add anything like the same mark-up as most other brands. This means we can sell the same great quality at a fraction of the price.
Let’s take a few examples. Start with socks. Our everyday socks are £6. You can buy pretty much the same sock (same yarn, same factory) for £24 from another well-known premium brand. Our £70 lambswool jumpers are made from the same yarn, in the same factory, as a £240 jumper from a different premium brand. And our selvedge jeans are £90 where you can easily pay £250 or more for an almost identical jean elsewhere.
Our clothes are not cheap, but they are exceptional quality, and exceptional value for money.
Honesty and transparency are important to us. We need more of it in the world. So we are very happy to share with you the economics of our business. This is because, unlike most brands, we have nothing to hide.
If you spend £10 with Community Clothing over £9 goes straight back into the UK economy, with around £5 of that being paid as wages to the great people who actually make our clothes.
How does that £10 spend break down?
£10 Spend =
£6.50 Product Manufacture
£3.90 UK Garment Manufacture
£3.40 UK wages
£0.50 UK other administration costs inc utilities, rent and rates
2.50 UK Materials Manufacture
£1.00 UK Wages
£0.50 UK Other administration inc rent and rates
£1.00 Raw cotton and wool - offshore
£1.70 Running Our Business
£0.85 UK wages
£0.85 UK other administration costs inc utilities, rent, rates
£1.80 UK VAT
Over half of what you spend goes directly into the pockets of the people who make the clothes as wages, most of them living in areas of the UK that really need an economic boost.
Of the remainder a portion is spent on local administrative costs, services like security, cleaning and transport, plus rent and utility bills. And the remainder is UK VAT and local Business Rates which goes to fund local services. In fact only about £1 of it leaves the UK, most of that going to pay the farmers who grow the cotton and wool we use to make our clothes.
And even better, because local spending gets circulated and recirculated within the local economy its economic value gets multiplied, typically about 3 times. Our average first-time customer spends around £40. This will generate £100 of local economic value. That’s fantastic for the local communities we work with, but also fantastic for the UK economy as a whole.
“In the fashion world, the philosophy behind Community Clothing represents a new way of doing things”
Creative Review
“In the fashion world, the philosophy behind Community Clothing represents a new way of doing things”
Creative Review
