This title caught my eye on Instagram yesterday, and it resonated strongly with me.
The post was from Patrick Grant about his brand Community Clothing. It reads as follows:
peak accounting for 1 in 5 jobs. In manufacturing towns like Blackburn and many others, millions of people proudly made the best quality textiles and clothing in the world.But then along came fast fashion, cheap synthetic fabrics, offshore production, and Black Friday. And with these the demise of the British textile industry. Millions of skilled workers, and hundreds of British towns, ended up on the scrapheap.
At Community Clothing, we believe in a different way of doing things.
Click the link to read more about why we’ll never do Black Friday here at Community Clothing.
Loopwheels is still a tiny company. We’ve grown from 2 people to a team of 7 since we started making Loopwheels in 2013. It’s not been an easy journey to develop a new product from scratch, to work out the best way of manufacturing it, marketing it, and getting it to customers around the world. But it’s a journey where we’ve always believed it was important to try to do the right thing for our local area as well as for our customers.
Our product isn’t cheap. because it’s made by hand in the UK from high quality, expensive materials. It’s labour intensive: we take our time to make sure the product is the best quality we can produce. Each wheel is made by hand with care and attention, and each wheel is important to us, because we know that a good pair of Loopwheels can make a really big difference to the comfort and freedom of the person buying them.
We’re here for the long haul.
We want to offer a quality service to our customers over many years. We want to support our international distributors to offer Loopwheels to as many people as possible around the world who might benefit from more comfort in their wheelchair. Loopwheels are not a cheap product, but they are a good product.
We offer payment plans in the UK, interest-free, because we know buying a pair of Loopwheels is a relatively big investment for most customers. In some countries, health insurance and national healthcare systems will fund Loopwheels: they understand that better comfort and reduced vibration will help prevent other health problems for people in the long-term. So though the cost may be high, the value for money is high too.
We can sometimes offer ex-demo products at reduced prices, but we try to keep our pricing fair for everyone, so we can stay in business, pay our staff a fair wage, and still be here to continue making Loopwheels for many years..
So no slash deals, just good quality, hand-made in the UK.
Thank you for your support in coming on this journey with us.