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Shwe’s fashion revolution

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Once upon a time, 33-year-old Julia Franco studied fashion in Milan and had a dream job working for the Italian icon Roberto Cavalli. These days you will find her working to disrupt the fashion industry alongside refugees in Durban under a new socially conscious label called Shwe. 

“I think that fashion can make a strong political statement, and that’s how Shwe started,” Franco says, adding: “It is not really about what we make, but how we make it. I try to use Shwe as a statement that asks why so many people are excluded from fashion when they shouldn’t be. Everyone dresses themselves and has the right to express and communicate. Everyone should be integrated into and represented in fashion, because everyone has a voice.” 

Franco first encountered traditional African seshweshwe (also written as seshoeshoe) fabric when she followed her boyfriend from Italy to South Africa, just under five years ago. It was love at first sight, and the diversity of patterns and colours inspired her to craft a new place for herself in the world of fashion. 

“When I first arrived in SA, I started to look for a place to fit in,” Franco explains. She had a lot of opportunities with a local retailer, but decided against it “because of what cut-rate retail clothing is doing to the industry”. 

A sociologist friend introduced her to some social justice organisations in Durban that assist refugees and the destitute, and Franco’s path became clearer. 

The Wearable Library: Shwe is a social enterprise that gives voice to Franco’s philosophy that fashion is a form of communication. Each garment has a tag that tells the story of the person who made it. Currently some 64 people are employed at one of a handful of Shwe’s hubs in Durban’s city centre. 

“I arrived at the Denis Hurley Centre in Durban with fabric and we started straight away, and I became a part of the sewing group. I learnt to sew with the group by taking a three-month course with them. It was a very interesting and humbling experience,” she says. 

Situated at the Emmanuel Cathedral in Durban’s inner city, the Denis Hurley Centre acts as a refugee reception for people who travel to SA to escape poverty, violence or political instability. The centre runs a number of programmes to support refugees, including a clinic, training programmes and an employment agency that tries to secure jobs for them. 

Getting started

It took a year to set the social enterprise up, and on 1 December 2015, Franco opened an e-commerce site at thewearablelibrary.com. “We had just one sample of each garment, and it took another two months to set up a production flow of sorts,” she explains. 

Six months later the social entrepreneur travelled to the UK to get support for the initiative. Trips to the US and Brazil followed. Today Shwe has a range of women’s clothing that retails in boutiques in Europe, the US and Brazil. 

Franco shares her Italian fashion experience, and ensures that the garments are fit for global sale. In keeping with her socially conscious approach, Franco insisted from the outset that the seamstresses be paid a good living wage. Payment is made on a per-item basis, so those who put in a full day’s work can maximise their earnings, while some refugees prefer to work part-time, as this enables them to attend college or university. 

Shwe’s approach is in stark contrast to the often cut-price strategies in the garment industry. These include outsourcing manufacturing to sweatshops in countries that have poor or no regulation, like China and Bangladesh. For Franco, this is not an option: she prefers to make less profit, and to ensure that people who work on Shwe are well paid. 

Lessons

So what is the most important thing Franco has learnt from this endeavour? “The biggest lesson I’ve learnt from Shwe is that you can’t do anything like this by yourself. It is a group effort. We have 64 women linked directly with Shwe, and every single woman is important to the whole process,” says the social entrepreneur, who explains that Shwe recently did a collaboration with the Durban University of Technology. 

“The university helped to teach the women in our group to learn the basics, like doing a good finish and putting in zips. It was a beautiful project, but also very emotional. 

“When we arrived at the university, we discovered that some of the refugees had never been to school before. Any kind of school. That is when I realised that this was beyond just giving a profession to someone. That this is about hopes and dreams. That it is about community and us as a group helping and supporting each other,” Franco explains. 

When it comes to talk about the bottom line, Franco says she isn’t in this for the money. “I’ve lost money setting this up, and I invest everything that comes in. Because it is always a matter of deciding to take a bigger salary or helping five more people. I always want to help more people. If you want money in fashion, it would be best to take a traditional job or open an individual brand, and not create a social brand.” 

Franco says that what inspires her is being part of a group and the sense of community she gets from working with Shwe. 

“I get to work with women who have survived the trip from Burundi, who have walked to Johannesburg. Women who today can feed their children because Shwe exists. These women are the Shwe brand, not me. I just do the selling and the organising. I feel quite humble and thankful to be a part of something that is bigger than me, that is about the new world of fashion,” Franco explains. 

Challenges

There have been a lot of challenges since Shwe has become fully operational. 

“A big lesson has been to understand what work means. Everyone sees work differently. What’s been important is to define what work means to people individually, and to align this with the requirements to make the project viable. Everyone we work with comes from different generations, different backgrounds, and different countries, so finding a way for these individuals to work as a cohesive group has been both a challenge and a big learning experience,” she says. 

“The challenge of cash flow is also very real because we have big dreams, but a limited budget. We want to try and fit so many things in, but we do have bills to pay.” 

Franco says that the operation takes a lot of organising and driving around, and that sound logistics are important. “My father always had this saying that goes: ‘If the head doesn’t think, the body pays for it.’ If you don’t organise well, you will pay for this through stress, or by having to run around more than you should.” 

It took a year for Shwe to become a sustainable project. The online shop is ticking over nicely, and Franco has managed to sell to a growing number of international stores.

“In November 2016 we started to become profitable, which is gratifying and important to our long-term growth.” 

The fashion brand is now a sustainable social enterprise that gives refugee women an opportunity to work in fashion and earn a living wage, while taking a socially conscious local fashion label across the world. 

This article originally appeared in the 16 February edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here.

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