hessnatur’s philosophy is not only about using natural fibres and producing under fair working conditions. It’s also about giving back something to people who have specials needs. Like people in poor countries.

My blog today is about our social business with Grameen Knitwear in Bangladesh. It all began when I met Dr. Yunus – he’s the founder of the Grameen Bank and nobel peace price winner from 2006 – in Berlin. We said right away that we should do something together. Dr. Yunus is famous for microcredits and fighting against poverty – and hessnatur is famous for organic cotton. We agreed on bringing our organic know-how and his know-how in social business together.

Grameen Knitwear is based in Bangladesh, which is one of the worst countries for making clothes: poverty of the people working in the garment factories, a lot of factories producing „one dollar“ T-Shirts. They don’t care for organic or environmental standards, they don’t care for social issues and fair working conditions.

Grameen Knitwear is different. Good working conditions, fair wages. And they are open-minded to do something completely new – this was the premier of our Grameen T-Shirt made of organic cotton. Our creative director Miguel Adrover did the design – a strong statement saying „The world in your hand“ – for the T-Shirt. You can order it in our webshop. We produced the Tee at Grameen Knitwear in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. The money we make by selling this T-Shirt to the customers gets back to Bangladesh – not only to Grameen Knitwear, also to the Grameen Foundation and the Shikkha project to support the education of young people, especially young women.

This is what is called social business. It’s not about „I want to make money, I want to make profit“. It’s about others – doing something good for them by making and giving money.

Tags: Grameen Knitwear, Grameen T-Shirt, social business, Social responsibility, Wolf Luedge

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 2:36 am and is filed under Environment, Fashion, Material, Production, Social responsibility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.