Manifesto
Manifesto
Black & Beech was founded with a mission to make conscious, purposeful, feminist informed fashion.
From concept to creation, we set out to support women, to inspire feminist activism and to create timeless, quality garments and apparel in an environmentally conscious way.
We put quality and social partnership at the heart of what we produce. Every piece starts with a meticulous research process that includes customer interaction and conversations and collaboration with women illustrators and artists.
We pride ourselves on provenance, working only with suppliers who maintain the highest ethical and sustainable credentials. We invest time in developing long-standing relationships with our suppliers, many of whom are independent family-run businesses themselves. We visit them regularly and we pay fair wages to deliver well-made garments using the highest quality products and materials.
In the last five years, Black & Beach has reached over 20,000 customers worldwide, supported dozens of local suppliers and creatives and raised over £16,000 for women’s rights charities.
In the next five years we will build on our ethical, feminist achievements by becoming a B-Corp Certified business, expanding to bring more people into the flexible working Black & Beach team and start a free feminist business mentoring programme for women and non-binary people.
Here’s how we create ethical fashion to inform and inspire feminist revolution.
Governance
We adopt a ‘Social Partnership Sororite’ approach to business, working alongside and consulting with customers, producers, partners, suppliers, staff and charities to design and create high-quality, sustainably-sourced, beautiful and purposeful fashion.
We have a clear and transparent financial report process, sharing regular financial updates with our stakeholders. We continue to hold ourselves accountable by sharing updates and reports with our customers on our social and environmental impact.
We are a Real Living Wage employer and after salaries, any additional profits are invested back into the business to make continuous improvements to the work environment for our employees.
A large proportion of our finances are donated or invested back into women-led charities and organisations. From the start, we have given a percentage every single sale to causes we believe in; supporting the fight for abortion rights, women’s safety and migrant women’s advocacy. In the last five years, we have given £13,000 to support feminist, women-led causes and we project to double this to donate £26,000 in the coming five years.
In the spirit of social partnership, we have changed the legal structure of the business from shareholder-led to stakeholder-led. This places an emphasis on good governance that embeds a purpose beyond creating profit and requires us to consider the impact of our actions on our stakeholders as well as shareholders.
Workers
As a feminist employer, we provide flexible working and flexible contracts so that parents can earn around childcare responsibilities.
We believe in fair pay for quality work. Our team are paid the UK Real Living Wage and we regularly reinvest profits to make workplace improvements. These include ensuring barista-grade coffee is always on-tap and that there’s always a plentiful supply of organic period products in our staff bathrooms. We are dedicated to ensuring Black & Beech is an enjoyable, supportive, feminist place for our people.
We work hard to develop strong, long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationships with our suppliers. We work with small, independent suppliers so that we can ensure these relationships are in place.
Suppliers like our knitwear factory in Ayrshire in Scotland who are preserving vital jobs in a small rural community where there are generations of the same families working in the factory together. Our contract with them helps to support a rural community at one of the last large-employers in the area.
All suppliers are hand-picked for partnership because of their commitment to being responsible employers, creating the highest quality outputs, produced to the highest possible ethical standards.
We never haggle or cancel orders with suppliers. We always pay forward deposits and adhere to their terms. Freelancers such as artists are paid their rate and are always paid on time. No one is ever offered payment in kind and we don't ask anyone to do things for ‘social media exposure’ ever. We regularly survey our suppliers to ask them what they think of our business relationship and to take on any recommendations they might have.
We visit our UK based knitters, screenprinters and other suppliers in person to ensure their working environments meets our high standards.
Outside of the UK, in Portugal and India, we have staff on the ground who work independently of the suppliers to ensure the ethics and standards we expect are fully adhered to. In the coming years, we have committed to visiting these supplies personally on a regular basis.
The vast majority of our suppliers are holders of a range of accreditations which are independently verified. For example, GOTS Fairwear & WRAP as well as SEDEXO certified so that they are independently audited to reach high standards of safety and care.
Environment
We are committed to putting people and planet before profit. We design things to be long-lasting and timeless; not ‘on trend but ‘our trend’.
Our T shirts & sweaters are PETA certified Vegan and most are produced in a Carbon Neutral factory. 95% of our cotton is Organic, the rest is BCI cotton.
The wool we use is renewable, biodegradable and our business plays a small but important part in keeping a much-valued UK wool industry alive. Our knitwear is 100% Wool but is mulesing / cruelty-free, and the spinner adheres to the RSPCA 5 Freedoms. We are also introducing Organic Cotton Knitwear for our vegan customers.
When sending our products to customers, all website orders are carbon offset by Planet, a service we pay for to help reduce our environmental impact.
We have all-paper packaging and boxes which are made of recycled materials and are fully recyclable, as is everything else we pack with, from the tissue paper to the packing peanuts and postcards. From 2024, we aim to have fully transitioned to home compostable polybags used to protect our garments during shipping from our suppliers.
As a business, we limit waste as much as possible and we never dispose of our clothing. Everything is sold and anything utterly unsellable is recycled.
We consider the life cycle of every product and design with a "buy better make it last" philosophy. We make things that live beyond the world of fast fashion or trends favouring a slower design-led approach.
Community
Feminism is nothing without community. We have grown an online global network that mobilises around feminist causes and supports one another. It’s our Sororité.
Black & Beech is committed to profiling online intersectional feminist learning, alongside our retail output, to inform and inspire offline grassroots activism.
In this process, we platform marginalised women, passing the mic on key issues where greater insight and understanding can be learned from key voices and experiences.
Founder Stacey Grant-Canham uses her profile and experience to raise thousands of pounds for feminist causes and to support her offline community too. She has been a panellist on the issue of sustainability at the Irish Consul in Cardiff, a keynote speaker for the BMJ on women in business, she has delivered a speech on maternity rights at the Cardiff ‘March of the Mummies’ protest and organised mass-support for the abortions-rights Repeal the 8thcampaign.
Stacey has committed to regular key-note talks on fashion as activism and empowering women as Black & Beech continues to reach new audiences across the globe.
Customers
Our customers are a foundational part of the ‘Social Partnership Sororite’ that makes Black & Beech successful.
Our relationship with our customers is based on a two-way interaction; their values, their opinions, their struggles, and their triumphs matter greatly to us and inform the direction of the brand, design and the issues we campaign around.
For some of our customers, wearing Black & Beech apparel is their activism; it’s their way of demonstrating their values and promoting feminist messages via the clothes that they wear day-to-day.
Our customers’ activism is often formed and informed by Black & Beech.
As a brand, we have always made it our mission to inform, inspire and act as a gateway to greater social and political feminist understanding.
Black & Beech has a responsibility to each and every one of our customers. We owe it to them to be honest, transparent, value and quality-driven, whilst offering them meaningful beautiful apparel.
We always undertake ethical marketing practices; never photoshopping and always working with a range models who reflect our customer base and the wider society.
By working with our customers and committing to being honest and transparent with them, we have developed a loyal, engaged and truly inspiring Sororité.