Pachacuti - Panama Hats and Fair Trade Clothing

For any entrepreneurs out there wanting a ready-made business, the business I set up with my husband a few years ago, Clean Slate Fair Trade and Organic School Uniforms is available at minimal cost.  Clean Slate was the UK's first Fair Trade and Organic school uniform supplier and there was a huge demand for our products for children with eczema which was made worse by the chemicals used to make school uniforms 'Easy Care' and 'Non-iron'

As Pachacuti became increasingly successful, we couldn't run two businesses and took Clean Slate off line two years ago.  However, we have still been getting daily phone calls from parents wanting to our purchase Fair Trade and Organic school uniforms!  We have a room full of varied stock - school shirt, trousers, skirts etc  and would be happy to let the business go at a really minimal price (probably about £2 per garment) to try to cover cost price on saleable stock.  Happy to give away the business name, all website design, photoshoots of the uniforms etc.

It has the potential to be a business which is easy to run and profitable, but the supply chain for the school uniforms needs to be re-established with fairtrade, organic producers. I would love to get the warehouse clear of the many boxes of stock we still have as I am paying monthly storage for school uniform we will never get around to selling.  So if anyone out there is interested in a new business, please let me know! Please email: carry(at)panamas.co.uk

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