Girls! Make Your Mark/Handbag.com People’s Choice
Safia Minney, People Tree, London
People Tree is the brainchild of Safia Minney and is built on two of simple yet profound goals: to promote environmental justice and to ensure the continuation of traditional clothing production techniques in order to protect the livelihoods of communities that would otherwise be lost through increased modernisation.
Working with around 70 different groups in 16 different countries, Safia insists that People Tree ‘always takes the hard route' in order to achieve its goals of social and environmental justice and to set standards for best practice. This has been rewarded by the fact that the company is the only fashion dedicated business to be registered as a member of IFAT (International Fair Trade Association). If ever you needed proof of the saying ‘good things come to those who wait' - lead times for most high street retailers are eight weeks, but for People Tree they can be anything up to a year!
People Tree currently has two successful stores in Japan and is hoping to open shortly in London. Safia dreams of eventually doing for the clothing industry what the Body Shop did for the beauty industry and winning would take her one step closer to making her dream a reality.
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