Episode 41: Student Experience Grant Specials - Charlie

Our last special, 'Student Trek to India' features Charlie, who talks to us about feeling helpless, making clothes with hemp, and motivating yourself. 

Each episode is a snapshot, a moment, a sneak inside the minds of five inspiring people who did exceptional things, unexpected things, things that transformed them during their time at Edinburgh.

The people who share their reflections have set up businesses, shared their passions with others, designed projects to make a difference, expanded their skills, travelled far and pushed themselves beyond what they thought they were capable of.

For this special edition of Multi Story, the experiences our guests share all have one thing in common: support from a grants scheme, funded by Edinburgh alumni and friends. Student Experience Grants have been supporting staff and student projects at the University of Edinburgh for 10 years. To celebrate this milestone we wanted to reflect on some of the inspiring things our students have achieved.

Find out more about the Student Experience Grants at:
www.ed.ac.uk/student-experience-grants

Transcript

[Theme music]  

00:07 
This is a snapshot, a moment, a sneak inside the minds of five inspiring people, people who did exceptional things, unexpected things, things that transformed them during their time at Edinburgh. 

00:20 
So my name is Charlie Thomas and I was at Edinburgh University from 2016 until May 2019. And I now run a men's shirt brand called Babble & Hemp, which sells men's shirts made of a fabric called hemp. Em, and I'm on a mission to reintroduce hemp to men's wardrobes because of the water savings that hemp has over other fabrics., notably using five times less water than cotton to grow.   

00:52 
Well, I wasn't expecting to sort of work in sustainable fashion, it was something that - I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do work wise, and I kind of assumed I would I work in in London, in a finance job or something like that. And when I was at uni, in my, in my third year, I got an email promoting a sustainable fashion trek to India to look at the fashion industry and behind the scenes of the cotton industry, and how much, how much water it uses. The trip promised to sort of educate us a bit on the pitfalls of fashion and how we might maybe contribute to something a bit better in the future.   

01:33 
I was always one to sort of say yes to unusual opportunities, you never know what's gonna come of something, if you don't say yes to it, you're guaranteed to get nothing if you say no. So I always say yes to those kinds of things. And I'm so glad I did.   

01:51 
We started in Mumbai, I think there were about 25 of us all in third year at Edinburgh, and about 15 were studying fashion and textiles and a few of us are doing business and a few in art and so on. And one - I remember one day we drove out of Mumbai about a three or four hour bus journey into Maharashtra's largest cotton processing farm and factory so that the cotton was brought in from the outfields in these huge bundles and then gradually processed through various different mechanisms into a fine yarn that they then sold to clothing factories. Driving in, we saw, you know, colossal amounts of water being pumped onto the fields and chemicals as well. And you know, some in this farm wasn't but neighbouring ones use airplanes to distribute chemicals and pesticides on the fields because it has such a wide spread and such a fast way of doing it. And that was one thing that interested me a lot was that I hadn't - I wasn't aware of the kind of the amount of liquid that went on to the clothing and and then another example, another time we went to a factory which was pioneering sort of artisanal manufacturing processes with with just very historic Indian techniques of block printing, using natural dyes from from beetroot and things like and pomegranate, that really captured my interest of where you can just use, you know, natural products to make cool things like that, with very little chemical wastage or anything.   

03:28 
I knew a bit about what went on because, you know, just through geography, I was aware of how the Aral Sea had been, had disappeared in in kind of Uzbekistan because the Russian at the time, the USSR, diverted some rivers to irrigate the area in western Uzbekistan to grow cotton. I studied that at uni actually, in my second year. And I knew that that was a thing in terms of the water usage, but I kind of. Seeing it happen in person was very different from just seeing it in a textbook.   

03:59 
I never thought it would affect me or that I'd be in a situation to be a person who could do anything about it. I just felt like, gosh, there's nothing I can do about this. What did feel a little bit helpless that I knew I was gonna fly back to the UK and my next item of clothing was probably going to be cotton because I didn't know what else I could have worn really. But what can I do about I'm just a small person in six and a half billion people, what am I going to do about it? whilst we're in India, the final day was a really fun day. We're in a university in Mumbai, and we had sort of five or six local companies or NGOs come in to present their, the way they're approaching the sustainable fashion industry. But the company that really interested me was an Indian hemp clothing start-up that was pioneering hemp clothing in India. And these two cool guys - I was 21 at the time and they were 28, 29 - were talking about how they were using hemp fabric, which was the fabric that had been around for 1000s of 1000s of years. But then it was made illegal to grow because it was linked to the cannabis plant. But most importantly, it grew, only requiring rainwater, and no chemicals or pesticides. So it had basically just had an interesting history had, you know, had been used for 1000s of years. And ecologically, it was the solution to what I'd learned about as a problem in the days beforehand, in out in the fields. And I was like, wow, that's amazing. And my instant reaction was simply I'd like to buy some of this clothing, it looks nice, it's got an interesting story, and these guys are these guys are fixing this problem of wa-, of cotton. So I actually, I actually spent the next year working with them trying to be a distributor for a, for this company in in the UK, with a pal of mine who was on the trip. And we didn't really get very far because we were very young, we didn't know what we were doing in terms of we had - knew nothing about ecommerce. And then I decided that I kind of didn't want to just be a salesperson for this brand my whole life, I wanted to build something my own. So I'd always loved shirts, always loved men's shirts, and kind of understood a tiny bit about ecommerce but not very much. And found that through the fabric, you know, through my love of shirts, learning about ecommerce as a way to get it out to people would be a way to do a tiny, tiny, tiny bit to solve the problem that so much clothing we make and buy is cotton, and I wanted to provide an alternative. And, so yeah, I spent the last two years trying to, trying to do that.   

06:48 
So at uni I ran, I think I ran around 14 marathons in my four years at university, including a double Ironman, which is 42 hours of non-stop triathlon. Training for a marathon, you literally just start with 5k, and then you. . . Every day you just work on it, and you do a little bit more everyday kind of thing, until you get your end result of you know, doing the race for the marathon. I kind of applied that to work. . . At the start, I knew absolutely nothing about ecommerce and didn't have a clue about what a domain name was, how to build a website, how to drive traffic to a website, how to, you know, get top of Google, as the shirt brand now is. I had no idea what those, what those tactics were, but just applying the kind of em, yeah, similar kind of running training principles of starting with a 5k and just working every day, kind of over a two and a half year period, as I have done now, of just incrementally improving things.   

07:46 
At some points I didn't, I went like three days without selling a shirt. Luckily, I had a full time job at the time with a tech company in London that meant it wasn't too big a problem. But you know, when you kind of you don't sell a single, you don't have a single piece of income for three days on what you think is going to be your life's, you know, the business you're trying to build. You kind of just sit there going 'oh God, maybe I'm not the right person to do this, maybe I'm bitten off more than I can chew'. And I still have it when I only sell two shirts in a day, I still have that same kind of thing. Like maybe this isn't a very good idea. But I think it just comes back to the, the actual underlying mission of what you're trying to do. And that is to turn people away from using cotton and get people towards hemp. And luckily, I've got a bit of a track record of customers and stuff now that. . . I have had bad times. And I've, em, what I do is I read emails from happy customers, all my great customers who've written me nice reviews, I appreciate them a lot. 

08:50 
So, I mean, sustainable is, it's a really tough word. Because the most sustainable thing you can do in clothing is to never make anything ever again. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that's not the case. And whether I like it or not, I make clothing for a living. Yeah, I create fabric, which then a factory turns into clothing and is shipped across the world and sold that, you know, that's not perfect. I'm not going to sit here pretending it is. But what's the alternative? It's that people are going to be buying - people are never gonna to stop buying clothing, that's not gonna happen. So you just have to basically create an alternative way for things to be done better. 

[Theme music]  

09:35 
We all have role models, people we look up to, people who encourage us or who leave a mark on our life. We asked our podcast guests: who inspires them? 

09:52 
So the first one is Yvon Chouinard who founded Patagonia. Patagonia clothing is, yeah it's a well known clothing brand, but actually what they, they're not really a clothing brand then they're more of a sort of, they're trying to create a revolution whereby people are just wearing better clothing made from fabrics, the upcycled fabrics and it kind of, he's trying to pioneer a different way of people to think about what they're consuming through clothing. So all of their marketing they do, it just wants people to imagine how they can live a better lifestyle, which doesn't harm the planet quite as much and the clothing they sell to monetize that dream that has a much smaller footprint on the planet than most other brands because of the fabrics of being upcycled, second hand or hemp or whatever it may be. And then the other is Nick Wheeler, who founded Charles Tyrwhitt shirts when he was at Bristol Uni in 1986. And has built that into a you know, enormous shirt brand that I think he sells about 5 million shirts a year, which is incredible having started you know from uni, selling 20 a week when he was a student. 

[Theme music]  

11:04 
Our podcast guests were supported by student experience grants, one-off awards that help fund innovative projects that help students make the most of their time at Edinburgh. The grants are funded by Edinburgh alumni and friends. Without their generosity, the scheme would not exist. Have you been inspired by this story? Are you a student or member of staff looking for funding? Search student experience grants on the University website to find out how to apply for support. Thank you for listening. And thank you to the donors who made the student experience grants possible.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai