For many people, starting up your own business is an intimidating prospect. For Safia Minney it was just common sense.

A long time buyer of organic food and a lover of fair trade products, Minney started thinking about how else she was spending her money. After searching for an ethical fashion brand that created clothes she would consider wearing, she had to conclude that there just wasn't one out there.

Nine years on and 43-year-old Minney's People Tree clothing company is the darling of the Sunday style supplements, has a line in Selfridges and attracts hundreds of new customers a year with its combination of ethical trading and accessible fashion.

“People Tree exists because I saw a real gap in the market. I decided that it was up to me to create the opportunity and build the market,” said Minney.

Evolving fair trade fashion

Until a few years ago talking fair trade in fashion meant swapping your Jimmy Choo's for a pair of Manalos. Ethical fashion, when it existed, appealed to a very niche market and was still considered too craftsy to appeal to mainstream consumers.

Now companies like People Tree are pulling away from the stereotype of leather free sandals and cheesecloth smocks to provide women with the choice to spend their money to help others as well as themselves.

“It's all about creating products that people actually want,” Minney explained. “Women won't buy fashion because it's ethical. It's an added bonus not an incentive.”

Starting out

Minney is a natural entrepreneur. She credits her flair for business to the women in her family. Her mother is “fiercely independent and energetic” and her grandmother built up a successful book business from scratch.

After leaving school at 17, she joined a publishing company as receptionist and by 20 was managing a team of eight, handling sponsorship and marketing for a range of business magazines. But the turning point came when, at the age of 22, she gave up her job, strapped on a backpack and took off travelling around Asia for four months.

“Travel inspired a change of direction," said Minney. "I began to realise that the developing world isn't the negative oppressed place that we're led to believe by the media. My experience was meeting people who were incredibly energetic and entrepreneurial and were making a living out of very small resources.”

Marketing experience

She came back with a love for textiles and handicrafts, and a belief that a lot of talent was being wasted on meaningless products and messages. Minney decided to combine her skills as a marketer and salesperson, with her desire to do something she considered worthwhile. With no significant seed funding she launched her own marketing consultancy for alternative publications.

“When I worked in publishing I had learnt solid commercial skills that I found I could direct towards something that more suited my personal convictions. A large part of it was also showing that I could do it on my own.”

It was when she moved to Japan that her commitment to the business of fair trade grew. She started developing the seedling ideas for People Tree, talking to policy makers, campaigners and media contacts about the market in Japan and the scope there for importing fair trade products.

Limiting ambitions

And she started small. She worked with English volunteers who were travelling through Japan and who had the time, the inclination and the energy to get involved with an ethical start up.

“We really had nothing but good will at the beginning, but when you've got such a strong purpose everything else can be slotted into place. We weren't overly ambitious, we recognised our limitations. We started with a few well thought out products and went from there.”

People Tree has managed to evolve its customer base along with its product range. By placing as much emphasis on communicating the company's ethical stance as promoting its new products, Minney believes that she's managed to give her customers an idea of how the company contributes to the communities it works with.

Loyal consumers

“Lots of people are still very much ethical tourists. They'll buy a fair trade product once and feel good about it, but then return to their usual brands. But you won't change the world by buying one organic cotton t-shirt. The customers we've had from the beginning are beginning to understand that if they keep on buying, we'll be able to expand and develop what we're offering.”

Building and managing a fair trade company is tough. As well as competing with hundreds of mainstream clothing companies churning out low priced high street fashion at an alarming speed, the nature of fair trade means that you'll always have problems with cash flow.

Fair trade is unpredicatble

People Tree pays the people who make its clothes long before the company receives the product. And the cost of working with isolated and peripheral communities, in poor countries with limited infrastructure, is always going to be high. If something goes wrong, then it's People Tree that takes the punches and risks losing customer loyalty.

“Fair trade is very unpredictable. When some of our suppliers in Bangladesh lost their homes and their livelihoods in flooding two years ago, we weren't just working to provide them with relief supplies. We also had to account for the disruption and effects of late delivery on the business as well.”

Ethical pioneers

But Minney will not be deterred. Five years ago she brought People Tree to the UK. She has plans to develop new product ranges and even open People Tree shops, selling next door to established household chain stores. In 2006, People Tree launched fair trade on the UK high street with a concession in Topshop's flagship Oxford Circus store in London.

Ethical business needs pioneers like Minney who will promote a different way of doing business. Her combination of solid commercial skills and utter belief in what she's in business to do has made People Tree one of the few ethical brands that has appealed to those who might take notice of the messages behind the clothing.


People Tree
www.peopletree.co.uk

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