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The five double Anti Drive Day four Catherine House and Hut Streets Center, and a big part of that this year, and a really exciting and I think a terrific new component has been the addition of the five double any drive socks that you buy the twenty dollars a pair and all that money goes to Katherinews in Nut Street Center. Like Mike and Darren Steel did from caer Alert, they bought twenty pairs for all their stuff.
Lovely idea.
You can do that too. We're sending you at a website called rough Sleeper rough sleeper dot com dot au. Nick Yeomens from rough Sleeper joins us Nix's the founder of this company, that this is a terrific concept. Nick, just take us through what rough Sleeper does. Obviously for us, you're making the undi drive socks, but that actually fits sort of neatly with broadly your mission statement what you guys do.
Good morning, Hey, thanks for having me on. Yeah, we are experimenting with what I like to refer peer to peer impact in a way to what we've done is we've created a fashion label label which is mainly elevated basic so T shirt, pretty sweat, stuff that people wear a lot of. And then what we're doing is we create the profit connects to the shelter in the location of purchase. So if the garment's purchased in Sydney, it goes to the Matthew Cowbot Hostel, if it's Adelaide at Hut Street, if it's LA at skid Row Mission, LA Mission in skid Row Bowery Mission, New York. We've got it set up with the Wondering Londoner in the UK and then every city in Australia. So effectively what it is if you buy a garment, the profit then connects into a street pack. So one of the biggest issues at the moment is with the level of homelessness. A lot of the shelters are full. So when a person struggling and they go to and they go to a shelter, it's full. Those shelters are now have the street pack which have got a whole heap of just basic essentials to help that person through the night. And then on top of that, we also connected up with an amazing organization in Melbourne called We Are Mobilized, and that's been founded by a guy called Noi Yang who is reverse engineering the problem from my perspective, there, they're putting people into housing for four weeks and they've got a direct giving program, so we were connecting profit into that as well, where it literally goes to the person who's about to hit the street or has just become homeless. So yeah, it's a bit of a It just mean interesting to see how people have sort of taken it. And the garments are made in fashion house, in factories that produce ethical factories that produce the fashion label. So it's yeah, just pumped to be giving that a go and also helping you guys out with the Undies run.
Nick I got to say, I've just as you've been talking, I've just been scrolling through your website and looking at the images of these street packs that you're talking about, described as thoughtfully curated backpacks containing essentials like hoodies, tracking socks, beanies, and toilet tries. It fits perfectly with what we're doing with the undies and bras and so on, and yeah, it's so good. I had no idea that you guys had an international footprint. It's such an amazing idea for a company.
Well, yeah, and we are in startup phase, so we haven't these sort of things that take a while. This is all out of our own funding, so there's no government funding, nothing like that. So it's like a commercial business that's profit for good, so it takes a while to build up. You know, obviously we've got profit going into the street packs, but then we've also got to buy product, do the Instagram, do the marketing, and all these types of things as well. So it really the concept is that people can create impact in their local community without having to give away all their hard earned So you buy a rough sleeper a jacket and you go, geez I bloody loved this jacket. You would have bought it anyway. It actually created social impact from your purchasing decision.
So tell us a bit more about that. Was there a model for this? Is this been done elsewhere?
Nick?
And you saw if we said, there's the international stuff you spoke to us about before, And did you come to it from the perspective of someone who was really interested in doing fashion that had a social conscious and it grew from there or were you looking to do something initially with a social conscience and from that the fashion component grew.
Yeah, it actually happened from I had an experience, an experience with a homeless person about fifteen years ago. It was an incident. I'd never done anything for anyone as bad as that doubt like in terms of I wasn't hugely socially minded. And I was driving down a street near my house and on a Wednesday afternoon it was and I just saw this guy on the park bench and it was bloody freezing, it was winter, and I had some blankets in my garage and I thought I should I should just go back and get those blankets. And then I actually I did it. I thought about it, and then I thought that's a bit strange and kept driving. And then I pulled over again and thought, why wouldn't I do that? And I whipped time, got the blankets, went back at the bar street actually in Gundel, the park there, and gave this guy these blankets and he literally just said thanks mate. And then from that that I started working for fred Band, so I got for fifteen years I was with Fred Ban and became quite good friends with a lot of homeless people, know a lot of homeless people. And then I did my own outreach for a while and SAH just got into that space but my background was in importing and manufacturing, so in the branded merchandise space. So from that it evolved into I wonder if we can I wonder if we can create a way where people can get that feeling of helping someone, but it's more measurable and and that's sort of where it evolves. So but yeah, it's been it's been super interesting, and we're about the best heavily again into the brand. So it's also a brand that corporate can buy in a in the trade space buy you know, someone wanted a higher level T shirt and a normal promo T shirt, they can buy a rough sleeper T shirt or hoodie like all the all the T shirts that Microsoft do, for example in the Agent Pacific are a rough sleep for brand.
Well, looking at the T shirts, they're not crazily expensive, but they're well, you know, without naming names. I mean you're talking about how you how you source them and doing it ethically. I Mean the reason you buy a three dollar T shirt in a few places is that's probably been made by kidd in Bangladesh, you know, So.
That's right, Yeah, and that's a huge part of the business. So we're one of the only only ten percent of fashion labels globally pay what's called living wage rather than minimum wage, so we pay a living wage. We use circular manufacturing technique, so we use a lot of waste fabric. We use a lot of recycled cotton blends with organic cotton, so we are in that space as well. But it's hard to sort of. It's actually really tricky communicating all of it because to communicate the whole ecosystem it confuses people. So that probably the easiest way to describe it is we describe it as good gear done right, because everything done right. It's actually the easiest way to describe it. It does take me about thirty minutes to describe the layers because there's a lot to it, I guess, so yeah, yeah, there's a lot to it. And then once we nail the model in Australia, we will roll it out the footprint. The shelter footprint is set up in about ten different cities around the world, but that took a good year to year to do. But the most important thing is we actually talk to the shelters. They're the ones who tell us what to put in the pack. So I'll ring Wayne Williams at Matthew Cowboy Sell for example, and so may have it going and he'll say terrible, like the numbers are getting worse. But he'll tell me we need this in them, and then I can sub out the I might sub out the hoodie and put in a something else. It's really about us collaborating with them to get all the information. I've got my own experience with homeless people, but these guys are the ones who are on the front line. You know, they're dealing with issues. Like the guy at Hut Streets Center, for example. They know exactly what what's needed, and we just direct the funds towards that.
Well makes perfect keep it being part of the UNDI drivers. They're going off that the socks have been terrific. We've had the premier of the state where them, the police commissioner wear them, and I suspect there's going to be heaps more before we finish this on.
The socks are going off like a frog in the exactly right.
Nick Yeomen's the founder of Rough's Leaver.
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