Let’s Talk About Pants – online

tl;dr – Last week’s Let’s Talk About Pants was great but we’ve cancelled the rest due to booking levels. We’ll do a tweet chat on 11th March 8-9pm and FB chat soon, dates TBC

This time last week I was rushing around a room in New Zealand House in London, getting set up and ready for Let’s Talk About Pants. This is part of our long discussion about how we can show pants on women’s bodies on our website in response to customer requests to see where the pants sit, without sexualising or objectifying women.

When I got the the news was mixed. The wine had arrived – hooray! – and the pizzas had been confirmed. And our parcel had arrived, via TNT.

Parcel. That’s a singular word.

We’d sent two parcels, a black case that contains our two pop banners, and a purple suitcase containing, ooh, fifty lingerie trade magazines, pants for people to wear over their clothes, tape, glue, t shirts, business cards, flyers, threads, tape measures, tools of our trade – all the stuff you need if you want to get people to suggest photos and layouts and ideas for how we might depict pants or pants making….

Guess which one hadn’t arrived?

Never being one to let the entire absence of everything I’d thought I needed get in the way stop me, I dashed off to a supermarket and was back with an armload of magazines before you could say YOU HAD ONE JOB, TNT (by the way – we’ve still not got our case back. *waves* helloooooeeee there TNT!)

At 5.30 pretty much on the dot, people started arriving *waves at Louisa*.And it was a *brilliant* event. Utterly brilliant.

My heart was warmed by meeting people like Alessandra and Shelley and Louisa and Liz and Sophie who I’ve chatted to by email and social media a hundred times but never met. And by seeing old friends like Kate and Clare. And meeting new people like Elly (who shared Hollie McNish’s wonderful poem Cupcakes or Scones which I urge you to watch), Katie, Catherine and Katherine (I’m sorry I can’t remember everyone else’s name) and hearing how much some of you love this tiny business. It’s a huge compliment and I imagine I feel something like a parent does when you tell them they have a beautiful baby. We got loads of great – great – ideas and we are still working through the papers and posters and collages. See all the pics here

I learned a lot at the event – not least that if you have 70 people signed up, you might only get 35 attend. That’s totally fine but very useful to know. Each event costs a minimum of £500 for us to run and we are a tiny business focused on creating jobs for marginalised women. £500 is a lot of wages money and so we have to weigh up what we spend funds like that on.

Today, right now, I was scheduled to be setting up in Manchester to do the same thing there. I’m writing this in Southampton – I’m not there.

Yesterday morning, I looked at our eventbrite pages for the upcoming Manchester and Birmingham events. Both had fewer then 20 people signed up. It was reasonable to expect that that might have meant ten people turned up.  That £500 is a lot of wages money to hazard on an event and so I cancelled both. A few kind people emailed saying they were sad. I’m sad too – selfishly, I’d have loved to meet more people who love this business. And I have no doubt that it would have been fun and we’d have found some great ideas. But £500 is a lot of wages money and I have a responsibility to make sure it’s used in the best way possible.

Over the next few weeks, there will be a chat on twitter and facebook about this (dates to come) and I can’t wait to hear your ideas. Please do join in – the collective brain of Team Pants is a wonderful thing!

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Immigration Street – not wanted here.

tl;dr – No-one round here wants Immigration Street including us; they asked us to be involved and even turned up at our door after we said no. We like immigration and hope; we don’t like immigration street

You may have heard that Love Productions, the production company behind programmes like Benefits Street and The Cruel Cut are filming a programme in Southampton called Immigration Street.

This has not been well received. People have travelled to the Channel 4 offices in London to protest about it. Public meetings have denounced it. The TUC have spoken out against it. There are petitions  against it. People here are making it clear that they don’t want it.

Derby Road, upon which the show is to focus, is a hop, skip and a jump from our tiny factory, Well, it’s a few hundred yards away, round the corner, over the level crossing and left.

It’s an energetic, vibrant street. I cycle along it if I’ve a meeting in town and it’s one of the few streets in Southampton where I see kids playing out. Cars go slowly here, knots of people chat and shop and bustle. Other streets issue off it up a slow hill, leading up to the Royal South Hampshire hospital. Cafes and shops change hands, change names regularly. It’s full of energy, entrepreneurship and hope.

I’ll be honest. This area, where we and Derby Road are – Northam, Newtown, St Mary’s – is not wealthy. It appears unfavourably in the Indices of Multiple Deprivations. It scores low on measures like Economic Engagement. The housing stock is not of great quality and the roads poorly maintained; it’s one of the cheaper parts of town to live. And so, when the successive waves of immigration have washed over this port city that we live in, this part of town has seen Ethiopian and Lebansese, Carribean, Turkish, Somali, Polish and Indian restaurants and shops open up alongside the Gurdwaras, Hindu temples, mosques and churches all around. St Mary’s, home of the Saints, is named for the church which still stands next to City College today, where many of our team here passed English exams.

Which bit of migration, exams and entrepreneurship doesn’t say hope to you? I see it everywhere.

Today, Derby Road is plastered with signs like these

Image from Guardian Sunday 8th Feb 2015

They’re in house and shop windows and on street signs in a glorious act of civil disobedience, designed to spoil camera angles. People are protecting their homes – the places they love.

We were approached by Love Productions. Back in April 2014 they emailed asking if they could talk to us. After conferring with the team, I said no. I then received another email, which I think wasn’t meant for me as it addressed someone else and said,

‘Thanks for this and sorry for my late reply. Shame that Becky isn’t keen. Do you think it’s worth me dropping in on the factory in person? Or best to leave it there?

I replied again saying thanks but no. I was starting to feel a bit Mama Bear about it.

Three months later, someone from the show turned up at the factory. They were asked to leave. The next day I received another email asking me to talk saying,

‘I fully respect that you don’t want your company to be involved, and I have no intentions of trying to twist your arm, I promise! It really would just be great to get a bit of your insight.

I replied that it didn’t feel very respectful to have said no repeatedly and to be pushed, repeatedly. If you know anything about my life, you’ll know that my ‘no’ not being heard is going to push a few of my buttons.

Like so many of the people who have spoken out against it, we’re concerned by what this show will do. Derby Road and this whole area is a diverse, energetic, entrepreneurial, hard grafting place – it doesn’t need tensions to be stirred up in the name of ratings.  For centuries people have entered Southampton from the water at this end of town, and while now people tend to arrive into the UK on planes, the one thing that unites them is that come with hope in their hearts for a brighter future. One they’ve travelled for. One they’re prepared to work for. One they’ll push their kids to study for.

We believe in hope, not hate. We believe in solidarity, sisterhood, supporting our neighbours; in the absolute benefits of immigration, and diverse societies. We’re proud to be where we are.

See you on Hope Street

(can you spot us?)

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Galentine’s Day

Have you heard of  Galentine’s Day? If you’re a fan of Parks and Recreation you may well have –  according to Leslie Knope, it’s only the best day of the year. 

We LOVE the idea of a day to celebrate our women friends (we tend to celebrate them on International Women’s Day and Day of the Girl too – can’t have too much of a good thing) and this year we’re running a competition for you and a friend to win a Best Friend pack each. Containing a pair each of our best selling Brilliant Black and brand new Bazooooka Aimee shorts, this is a gorgeous pack, we smile every time we look at it!

 

To be in with a chance to winning, just tell us – in the comments below, on facebook or twitter, why your best friend is the best by 5pm on Wednesday 11th – we’ll announce the winner on Thursday 12th and with luck your pants will be with you on Galentine’s Day itself!

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Cutting, our way.

Here at WMYP, every single pair of pants is cut by hand with a roller knife, the kind you might have at home – see it, at the back of this picture?

We’re about empowering women through work and we think that there’s a lot of pride in your work to be gained from actually cutting things yourself and knowing you did them well.

There are all kinds of ways that fabrics are cut in industry, from the low to the very high tech. Whatever level of tech, broadly, they all tend to include these steps: lay out fabric, put patterns on fabric, cut out, make bundles of related pieces, deliver to machinists.

Cutting can be done with round roller knives like ours, vertical bladed knives, or lasers. This short video of making Hawaiian shirts  is a great example of the steps involved. Weights might be put on the stack of fabric to hold it still; clever machines might drive up and down to lay the fabric out and cut it into manageable lengths automatically; at the very high tech end of things, a computer might generate the pattern, taking account of the weave and/or stretch of the fabric and arrange the pieces mathematically to get the most out of the fabric and then draw that onto the paper on top of the stack and then control a laser to cut it all out too.

We’re not very high tech. Our team hold their knives in their hands and cut. They lift the rolls of fabric onto our 3m x 2m table covered in a thick plastic mat themselves, roll fabric out, smooth it down, cut it to a manageable length. Then repeat. They can cut through up to five layers of fabric at a time, so they might lay out five lengths of fabric, then put our patterns on, weight them down and cut round them.

We could cut more in the same time if we used a laser or a vertical knife. We know that that would mean our pants could be cheaper. But for us there really is something in actual hands doing the work, being proud of that work – and that work being fairly valued and rewarded. Cutting is a skilled and important job – and it’s also a job we can give to someone even if they can’t read or write.

We’re about empowering women through work, about teaching skills and about being proud of what we do well. When someone has looked at the knife and the patterns nervously, and then when they see that they have cut 100 pieces perfectly and they exclaim, ‘But it is easy!”  – well, we know that’s been a Good Day.

 

 

 

 

 

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