Pachacuti - Panama Hats and Fair Trade Clothing

Thursday night saw me heading to the Victoria & Albert Museum for the 'Green Oscars', the Observer Ethical Awards, but first I had to visit Amin Phillips of Love & Be Loved who had created the most stunning green silk dress for me to wear. 

 

I arrived at the V&A with my husband & Pachacuti Marketing Manager, Mark Rogers, and Doraliz Aranda, Production Manager.  One of the first people I spotted, unmissable in her fuscia Pachacuti fedora, was Pamela Ravasio, Pachacuti's Press & Marketing Officer, who was independently up for an award for her blog Shirahime.

 

After champagne and socialising, the awards commenced.  The panel was composed of 32 judges who included actor Colin Firth, TV presenter Ben Fogle, Deborah Meaden from Dragon's Den and model Lily Cole.  I was delighted to hear Livia Firth, battling laryngitis, announce Greg Valerio as the winner of the Global Campaigner category.  Greg pioneered Fairtrade gold which was launched this year and worn by Livia Firth on the red carpet at the Oscars.  Read more on Livia's Vogue blog.

 

 

Other winners announced were Compassion in World Farming in the Campaigner category, with Bill Oddie accepting the award; the People's Supermarket, who were presented their award by Colin Firth; The Co-operative Group won the Ethical Business category and we were delighted when it was announced by Baroness Lola Young that Pamela had won the ethical blog award.  Before the awards started, Mark and I had been walking on the Pavegen paving slabs which turn the energy from footsteps into electricity and their win in the Big Idea category was extremely well-deserved.

 

Finally, it was time for the Fashion & Accessories category and T4 presenter Rick Edwards, together with Vogue fashion features editor Jessica Bumpus, took to the stage.  This is always one of the most hotly contested of all categories and we were up against strong competition: Veja with their ecological footwear made from sustainable Amazonian rubber and organic cotton and Christopher Raeburn, a designer who re-uses parachute silk and military fabrics in his collections.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winning this award is such a fantastic accolade for Pachacuti's work in pioneering Fair Trade Fashion since 1992.  I am delighted that the eminent panel of judges appreciated the hard work which my wonderful team based in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, and I have put into in continuing to push the standards higher in the field of ethical fashion.  Pachacuti became the first company in the world to be Fair Trade Certified by the WFTO and we are now piloting an EU project on Geotraceability: the Geo Fair Trade Project. I am delighted to receive this award in recognition of the hard work which my staff and I have put into creating a Fair Trade, sustainable supply chain for our Panama hats, clothing and accessories and the innumerable benefits which this has brought to our producers and their communities in the Andes.  I can't wait to visit our producer groups in Ecuador this week and tell them about this exciting award.

 

The final award of the night is the Lifetime Achievement Award, won previously by Sir David Attenborough and last year by Gordon Roddick, pictured with me left.  It was Anita who initially inspired me to set up Pachacuti after reading her autobiography and thinking that if she could revolutionise the beauty industry with no experience in that field, there was nothing to stop me from trying to do the same within the fashion industry. 

 

This year the Lifetime Achievement Award was won by scientist and originator of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock.   His pioneering model is the foundation of climate science today.

 

I had a wonderful evening at the awards and later at the after party where we continued to drink champagne into the early hours, exchanging stories with the Observer Food Editor about our respective visits to El Bulli.

 

The Observer Awards recognise those companies who make ethical living more accessible and achievable and this year's award winners do exactly that, from ensuring you can buy an ethical gold wedding ring to delivering weekly veg boxes or campaigning against mega-dairies.  It is a real honour for Pachacuti to be an award winner this year alongside so many other incredible campaigners and ethical pioneers

 

This was written before the Mumpreneur Awards at which I was awarded Inspirational Business Mum 2010!

As a finalist in the Green category of the Mumpreneur Awards I started wondering how I became an accidental Mumpreneur

I didn't ever plan to be a Mumpreneur.  Firstly, I didn't ever plan to run my own business and secondly I didn't intend to have children… so how did this happen to me!

 

Pachacuti really was an accident - it was only meant to be a research trip for my MA.   I met two groups of workers who had organised themselves into co-operatives, but both had experienced arson attacks due to the threat which they posed to the intermediaries' monopoly of the supply chain.  Outraged by these clear injustices, I decided to return to Ecuador in order to provide a sales outlet for these groups who were unable to trade locally.  My intention was to sell the knitwear over the summer before starting my fully-funded PhD in Andean textiles.  However, I hadn't envisaged the success of my first collection, nor realised the positive impact it would have on my producers' livelihoods, so at the end of the summer I reluctantly turned down my PhD.

In 1996 I found I was pregnant but carried on working and travelling.  To be honest, I'd never thought of having a child and had never even held a baby until I was 9 months pregnant.
                                                               Sienna on  holiday in France last week
At 7 months pregnant I was sailing off the coast of Belize when we were shipwrecked on a reef near a deserted island.   After making it to shore in the middle of the night, on an island known for its poisonous spiders, we were eventually rescued a day later by the Guatemalan Navy.  After a  scan at a Guatemalan clinic to check the baby was ok and the news I was expecting a boy, I made the long journey back to Colombia to take a flight back to the UK, technically now after the latest travel date for pregnant women. 

Half an hour into the flight I felt contractions.  I called a stewardess and of course the plane became rather a commotion once everyone realised that someone was potentially going into labour on their flight!  Fortunately there was a midwife on the flight who rubbed a tub of Vicks into my stomach and made my walk up and down the corridors for hours  which seemed to do the trick and I made it home without further incident.

My daughter was born at a stage when the business was making very little profit and I was having to pay back the debts resulting from a large theft in Ecuador at the inception of the business (but this is another story… armed robber, death threats - it was an eventful time!) 

I was back to work immediately, taking her to a festival where I was trading at just 12 days old and slinging a hammock up for her beneath rails of clothing!

A year later I was a single mother, working a 70 hour week and juggling childminders and nursery...Click below on Read More to continue reading

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In July I attended the National Awards for Excellence in which Pachacuti was a finalist in the International category for our impact on Millenium Development Goals.  The other finalists were all huge multinationals such as Barclays Bank, Reuters, Cisco Systems and several more.  The award ceremony took place at the Royal Albert Hall and and coincided with a celebration of the Prince of Wales 25th anniversary as president of Business in the Community, with the ceremony hosted by Stephen Fry.
Pachacuti was shortlisted in the International category which recognises a company's impact on addressing Millenium Development Goals.  Pachacuti was one of  three East Midlands businesses shortlisted in their categories, the others being Northern Foods and Rolls Royce. 

The International Award was won by Barclays Bank who, together with The Guardian, have supported the Katine project in Uganda which has increased access to clean water.  We were delighted and surprised when it was announced that we were Highly Commended in the International category. Also Highly Commended in the category was Reuters for the information service provided to the Indian farming community via mobile phones.   

Pachacuti's award was for the Sustainable Fair Trade Management System which we have implemented over the past two years.  Six months ago, Pachacuti became the first company in the world to be certified against this new standard and are now able to label all of our clothing and accessories as Fair Trade Certified UK 0001.  In addition to paying a fair wage to producers of our clothing and Panama hats, Pachacuti is involved in improving all aspects of their social and economic wellbeing, from providing training classes to purchasing glasses and paying for cataract operations.  Around 70 organisations worldwide are now using tools and methodology developed by myself and my team in order to assess the Fair Trade development of their producers.

I hope that being Highly Commended for the International award proves that you do not need to be a large company in order to make an impact on achieving Millennium Development Goals. I believe that every small business in the UK could potentially affect the lives of their overseas suppliers through ensuring high social and environmental standards throughout their supply chain.

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What an incredible evening we had last night! Shoreditch Town Hall was the setting for the very glamorous Re:Fashion Awards, the world's first awards dedicated to ethical fashion.

I really hadn't expected to win - and certainly not to win two awards! The list of finalists was impressive (Pachacuti was up against the likes of People Tree and Pants to Poverty) and there are so many of the finalists who didn't win but have made such a significant contribution to ethical fashion, such as Junky Styling. Walking away with two awards - Re:Business and Re:People - on the night was amazing recognition of the integrity of Pachacuti as a fair trade, sustainable fashion brand. I feel so honoured to have received such a high level acknowledgment of my work as one of the very first pioneers in the world of ethical fashion and also the current groundbreaking work we are doing in the pilot for the new standard on fair trade, sustainable product certification. It really is a very exciting time for all of us at Pachacuti!

In the past, we have often felt that being out of the fashion epicentre of London works against our business; somehow the idea that you can't have a credible fashion label based in rural Derbyshire. I think that these two awards have catapulted us into the spotlight as so many people hadn't heard of Pachacuti, although they have probably seen a lot of clothing and accessories which are own-labelled for major retailers without being conscious of the fact that they are produced by us.

The Re:Business Award was the first of the night and when Pachacuti was announced as the winner I just about leapt out of my chair in excitement. However, when I went forward to collect the award, there was no obvious way to reach the stage and when Mark and I looked up, the award had been taken off the stage. We went back to our seats and thought that it was a bit odd that the awards weren't actually being presented to the winners. As the shortlist for the Re:People Awards was being announced, I was told to go around to the backstage area to receive my award and so missed the actual announcement about the winner of the next category. I went onto the stage expecting to now receive my Re:Business Award and was confused to receive the People Award instead - a beautiful, giant recycled glass construction. We came off stage and mentioned to one of the organisers that we had been given the wrong award. It was only when I got back to our table and asked who had won the Re:People Award as we had missed it, that we were told that we had in fact won that as well! It just had never crossed my mind as I had thought that People Tree would undoubtedly win the People Award. So I left clutching two huge, and rather fragile, glass trophies which we will exhibit with great pride in our shop window.

I really hope that winning this award will raise Pachacuti's profile and that this will, in turn, result in more orders for our producer groups. Having just returned from South America, the one thing every group wanted was more work and so I hope that, through these two awards, our clothing and accessories will become known to a wider audience.