Something Used
By Hugh McIntyre
HOW IS A CLOTHING LINE BORN?
In most cases, a designer is inspired by
a vision that translates into a line and a
new company. However, Something Used
was already five years old when its first
clothing line was designed and marketed.
Before that, the company had been
involved in everything from publicity, to
music distribution for bands, to concert
bookings across the United States.
The brand had developed a following:
50,000 online Facebook “friends” who
were following what the company was
doing. A vast majority of those people
were most interested in the fact that the
company donated a large portion of
profits to charities, no matter where the
revenue stream stood. If Something Used
planned a concert, the audience was
aware of the group that benefited from the
performance earnings.
This visibility, moreover, represented a
business opportunity. All these people
were loyal to a brand, yet they had no way
of supporting the mission of the company.
If a fan didn’t live near where Something
Used was having an event, there was no
way to contribute. It didn’t take long for
the idea of an online clothing company
to materialize.
The clothing line was to be something
very special and yet very simple. The
clothes would be nothing fancy: t-shirts
with interesting images and slogans. The
business model, however, would grow
and become more powerful. The idea
behind Something Used was that a person
did not have to choose between being
charitable and buying something he or
she wanted; indeed, by choosing the right
company, he or she could have it all. On
the other end, Something Used proved
that a company could have charitable
giving built into its business model and
still make a profit. For every item the
company sold, a donation was made, and
the customer factored this into his or her
buying decision.
Fast-forward three years, and Something
Used is completing its fourth clothing
line. Only one line appears each year as a
limited-time offer, so as to give people a
chance to buy what they want and also for
new people to catch on. Working under
this model for three years, Something
Used has shown that if you donate a
percentage of your profits and explain to
your customers what their donation will do
for the world, this can translate into sales.
Over the years, the company has worked
to change the world through the following
Something Used Impacts:
For every clothing line, Something Used
pays a nonprofit to cancel out future
carbon pollution, thus making the line(s)
completely carbon neutral. Over the last
three years, this has added up to over
207,000 pounds of carbon pollution that
will never exist.
One of the best ways to prevent future
poverty is to educate women today.
Something Used took this idea seriously.
When the second clothing line was
launched, a donation from each shirt’s
profits sent a girl to school for two
months. Each of these girls was a survivor
of the Rwandan genocide, and many had
been orphaned by it, almost certainly
dooming them to a life of prostitution
without some form of education.
Something Used paid to send 200 girls to
school for two months.
In the context of this focus on education,
the company observed that some
of the things keeping children from
developing countries out of schools can
be addressed. Children who cannot afford
shoes cannot walk to school; children
who cannot afford daily lunch money will
drop out of school. It is unacceptable that
a young child should drop out of school
because he or she cannot afford lunch;
therefore, the sales from another shirt
design paid for seven of these children to
buy lunch every day for an entire year so
they could continue their education.
While the business’s main focus is on
helping people, there are other causes
out there that are more than worthy of
our resources. Over eight years, the
company has paid to protect more
than 10,400 square feet of rainforest
and almost 15,000,000 square feet of
animal habitats in Asia. People take
precedence, but it can never hurt to
share some of the wealth.
In its most important and most
thoughtful donations, the company
dedicated a portion of the profits
from its third line of shirts to medicine
donations for needy people in
developing countries. For every shirt
sale, Something Used donated a
certain percentage to a nonprofit that
could allocate the funds effectively. In
addition, another company matched the
business’s donation, thus doubling the
effect. This has led to a total of $7,500 in
donated medicines.
Of course, the company has dipped
into many other causes, but these are
the five that have had the greatest
impact. The hope, moreover, is that
other businesses will take up the same
mission in their own way. Something
Used has already offered advice to an
individual seeking to start a clothing
line with the same social commitment,
and Something Used can only hope that
there are many more who will see that
it is possible to live in a world where
capitalism can flourish and yet benefit
those in need.
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