Does It Make A Difference If We Make A Difference?

Want to hear something really rather miserable? If not… perhaps skip this post.

When I worked for a bank (and I’ve never said which one, but it was one of the big four in Australia), the company did a lot for charitable causes (and still does). They paid for each and every one of their 40,000 odd staff members to take leave to do volunteer work during business hours a few times a year. They gave eye-wateringly large amounts to good causes. Black Saturday bushfires? They were there to provide call centre support for the Red Cross and Emergency Services. It was actually really nice to be part of.

That’s not the miserable part. The miserable part is that they did research and realised that NO ONE CARED. It made absolutely no difference to how people felt about the bank and made them no more (and if anything less) likely to open an account. Now many of you will be thinking ‘well, they’re a bank… surely with no benefit to themselves, they stopped doing all those good things’. And you’d be wrong. Instead they used the money they would have used on advertising their good deeds, and just ploughed it back into those very charitable activities no one gave a hoot about.

The part that always gets me is that the public just don’t care. How sad is that?

As many of you will know, Bento is made entirely within 10km of our studio. Design, patternmaking, fabric sourcing and manufacture is all done here. Even those little swing tags that hang off the clothes in the shop are printed here… From a carbon-footprint perspective, there aren’t many labels out there which are going to have a geographically tighter supply chain (and even now, I think there’s a lot more we could do, and we’re working on it).

Then we went the extra mile and hunted down manufacturers that are union-certified so that we can sleep soundly knowing our seamstresses and so forth are paid fair wages in a safe working environment.

I’m going to be honest with you. It’d be about a squillion times easier to just get stuff produced offshore, never see the workplace, not ask what staff are being paid, haggle over costs and so forth. But I fundamentally want to see the industry change, and I’m committed to being part of that change.

Despite what many think, this is NOT a problem that only exists overseas where “the cost of living is less”. ActNow outlines the magnitude of the issue locally, revealing that:

In Australia, there are 300,000 people making clothes for our major retailers [and] designers [...] who work for between $2 and $3 an hour. “

Recently, many large Australian labels were called out on the use of this sort of labour. It was all over the Herald Sun and other major publications. But can you name them? Have you heard of any labels going under due to poor manufacturing conditions? Yeah, me either.

As of yesterday, we started a small (very unscientific) test. After a quick survey on our Facebook page (you can still participate – www.facebook.com/thisisbento), we distributed to some of our stockists swing tags bearing the Australian Made logo.

The extreme majority of responses on Facebook indicated that the label being made locally made it more interesting. Yes, we already have ‘made in Melbourne, Australia’ written on our tags, but will this technically vintage retro-cool logo make any difference to sales?

All evidence to the contrary says no, but I’m personally hopeful.