Why did you start Clothing The Gap and what it is?
Clothing The Gap is an Aboriginal owned and led social enterprise using fashion as a vehicle to make social change.
A little-known fact is that before Clothing The Gap became its own brand, we were actually a clothing label running under health promotion company, Spark Health! Originally we created merchandise that reinforced cultural identity and celebrated Aboriginal culture as an incentive to encourage Aboriginal people to participate in our health and wellbeing programs. For example, if people came to four out of six program sessions, they received a piece of merchandise. The only way for people to get the piece of merch was to come to the program and people loved it!
As we grew and more people wanted to wear the clothes! We knew that if we could sell enough clothing we could self-determine health and education programs for Aboriginal Communities without relying on government funding. This social enterprise model meant that we could independently design and deliver health outcomes for Aboriginal Communities – no strings attached.
In order to run a sustainable business model and to achieve our goals of self-funding programs for the Aboriginal Community, it was important that the people purchasing from Clothing The Gap included non-Indigenous people too. We invite non-Indigenous people to support us by wearing our clothes, celebrating Aboriginal culture and educating themselves further in this space
For us, it’s so important that we don’t ‘sell out’ to just sell tees to more people. We create our products with our mob in our heart and everyone in our mind and remain true our brand values that are to advocate, educate, elevate and motivate people for social change.
We pride ourselves on creating products that represent Aboriginal people and their views and enable all people to wear their values on their tee.
Profits go to Aboriginal health and education programs, can you share a bit more about what these are?
As a social enterprise, 100% of profits at Clothing The Gap are used for a purpose: to add years to Aboriginal people’s lives. Every purchase at Clothing The Gap funds independent and self-determining health promotion programs and enables the team to continue to make impact through advocacy and education work while and motivating people for change and celebrating Aboriginal excellence.