Makes me feel kind of all warm that they’ve actually chosen our brand
Since the launch in 2008, Beaumont Organic have been working to pave the way for fashion to have a more sustainable future. Hannah strongly believes that the mission fro Beaumont Organic to become a more sustainable business, is an ongoing one. For 2020, Hannah is working to bring her customers full traceability of every product, from the farm where the raw materials are grown, to the factory that cut and stitched the garment.Find out more and sign up to the Creative Scale up Programme
Hannah helped us learn more about organic fashion
What’s your story?
We could go back as far as school but I guess it kind of started with a few entrepreneurial aspects of growing up, I was always making my own handbags and sending them off to little stores, selling friendship bracelets in the school playground, there was definitely something in me that knew that I wanted to have my own business. I actually found school quite challenging and learning quite challenging, and was diagnosed with dyslexia quite young so I have quite a strong work ethic in me because I think if you’ve got dyslexia that means you have to work quite hard to overcome and achieve the same as everyone else. So that resulted in me taking a gap year after school because I didn’t really want to do further education straight away, (so I) travelled around Fiji and the cooke islands, and Australia albeit on my own with an organisation called gap and I really grew as a person and grew in confidence. And I came back and did go to university, I studied fashion and textile marketing. Quite quickly got a job at monsoon just after I graduated as an assistant buyer, and I thought id probably stay there for a few years and grow within the industry . But after a year I kind of seen how things were done in the fashion industry; negotiating on prices, getting to the cost price that they wanted, taking buttons off that were nice to put plastic buttons on just didn’t really sit with me all the well and I just felt that clothes should be made properly with care and with love, and if I could start a business doing it correctly then thats the place I would rather be working. So in 2008 I jumped in with very little knowledge to be honest of the industry as a whole, besides just knowing how I wanted to run the business and how I wanted people to feel when they wore the clothes and the kind of impact we wanted to make. So from 8 organic Tee Shirts in 2008, we’ve now got a collection of over 100 styles a season, selling in 12 different countries through 6 agents and a database of 65,000 people so we’re definitely quite global which is quite an amazing feat but its definitely been a long journey.
Is there any particular reason for you being in Manchester?
I feel quite fortunate that Manchester is home actually because I think its an amazing, big city to live in and its still affordable to buy properties and live really well but its got all the amenities of kinda living in London really. So I’m blessed with the fact that is also my home, but I don’t think I would’ve started the business in London, it would’ve been very cost prohibitive and I would’ve felt quite isolated, and I think Manchester being smaller, the connections and the communities are much stronger here and people support each other more because generally speaking people are a bit friendlier. And it’s enabled me to grow the business, whether it be the rent all being cheaper on properties or staffing, to get to the place I wanted it to get to.
What do you get out of being creative; what else drives you, is it the reaction on people faces when they like your clothes?
I guess that’s there’s nothing more amazing than seeing people in our clothes, especially people who have been into one of our other stockers, like we stock in 110 shops around the world so there’s potential that someones bought it somewhere else, not here, and they come in here wearing something and that makes me feel kind of all warm that they’ve actually chosen our brand in a store amongst a load of other brands, and I’m very proud that people are choosing to wear our clothes. Im also on quite a mission sustainably with not only the world/wool but the fashion industry particularly, and so thats actually become as much of a passion of mine as the final garment because I think theres so much wrong going on in the fashion industry regarding how clothes are made that if we can make a difference then we should, and we should make our voice be heard
Hannah Beaumont – Fashion Designer
To find out more about Beaumont Organic, check out their website here.
If you’re interested in knowing more about The Growth Company, check out the website website here.
If you’d like to read more about the creatives involved in the Creative Scale Up programme, see below.
