Introduction

As a kid I have always wanted to own my clothing store. I remember using playing with blue-tac and creating concept stores, which offered a place to shop for all my Army men and farm animals. Although my stores when I was age of 6 were very basic the ideology behind owing something of my own has remained present in my day to day life.

It was 2009 when I starting work at my first retail job, I loved it so much, but I manly loved the generous staff discount. When boxing day came around, we had sales where we would see jackets reduced to as little as $1. It made me question how much it actually cost to produce a single piece of clothing. I started doing the math, how much you would have to pay your staff, rental costs for your sweatshop, equipment, power, water, materials, fuel costs, shipping and customs charges. It was clear that something has to budge to keep the costs down, so I set myself to Google.

I first came across an article about Nike and Apple sweatshops, this is when I saw the conditions of which these people who are creating the products that we use on a day to day basis. This really made me think about how lucky we are to be born into a county which has a net to stop power hungry corporations paying us below minimum wage, and being able to have access to freedom, time and money. This was a horrible conviction to think the clothes i'm wearing were made by people who were getting beaten, verbally abused, given no breaks or even time to go to the bathroom, working 18 hour days, and only getting paid $1 a day.

In my research I found a company called 'Freeset' who worked in Kolkata and took women off the streets who were involved in the sex trade industry. This inspired me, but I wanted to do things a little different. I wanted to document the whole process and give our business model to anyone and everyone as long as they themselves create an ethical sweatshop, which would eventually create awareness and cause the leading fashion brands to use fair trade sweatshops, it would give the workers a choice rather than being stuck in the sex trade world.

I wanted to create a Sweatshop which offered fair trade clothing not just your basic wears, but designer clothing with a different look of long back and drappy clothing. Clothing that would not look good, but would be made by people who are paid decent wages, are looked after, given proper breaks and are able to afford necessities in life such as hygiene products, clean water and electricity.

I then met someone with the same interests as me, his name was Jesse North. We then started discussing about how we could possible get around to make this idea take flight. We started drafting up how we would go about starting our own sweatshop, but the main problem we would have is financial. Neither of us have money and are both living pay check to pay check.

We decided the only way this would actually work is if we used a crowd funding platform. We knew this would be allot of hard work as neither of us have ever ran our own business, studied anything even close to marketing or business management, or have any clue on how we would actually get our friends and families support in helping us with this project.

But this is what gave us the drive. We realized we are perfect for this, as we will be documenting every small hurdle along the way that normal business men would have through about, detailing everything down to the smallest detail of what needs to happen to own a sweatshop. We know that this will be a long and hard journey, we know we will hit a few walls and meet allot of negative people along the way who will try and break us. But we will give it everything we have as we know that through this, we will be helping women in Kolkata, giving themselves and their family freedom.

I have always had a desire to write a book, ever since I failed English at school was was put into the 'learning disability' classroom with dyslexia. As a baby I contracted meningitis and was put on life support, no one knew if I would make it. I then lost all hearing, and grew up going to speech therapy classes every week. This put me behind my peers and meant I was always missing out on classes as had constant trips to the hospital. As I grew up my hearing got better and could hear just as well as anyone else. I have always struggled with learning and having to write essays for university, spelling has always been a downfall for me. I now have a personal goal to create an up-to-date blog for this campaign, from start to finish, with the goal of one day creating a book and sending the hard cover to my English teacher who believed in me.