How This Dubai Based Sustainable Apparel Brand Is Thriving During Times of Uncertainty
The Giving Movement founder, Dominic Nowell-Barnes, shares his entrepreneurial journey with Bazaar — along with how he launched the brand in the middle of a pandemic
Finding sustainable fashion brands that prioritise the environment, while being comfortable and fashionable isn’t always an easy triple threat to come across. The Giving Movement, a brand born during the time of the Covid-19 crisis, ticks all the boxes.
Bazaar talks to the founder of The Giving Movement, Dominic Nowell-Barnes, about how he began his journey as an entrepreneur, what led him to create his brand during the pandemic and what the future holds for the Dubai-based sustainable apparel brand.
HBA: You’re quite the serial entrepreneur, having established businesses since you were in your teens. Can you tell us a little more about The Giving Movement and how it all started?
Dominic Nowell-Barnes (DNB): I started business whilst I was in school essentially so I started selling things on the internet, I did that over a seven-year period, from around 18 to 25. I think I reached a point when I was 25 where it started to lose its meaning, obviously when you come out of school you are trying to earn money so the goal was financial, and by the time I got to 25 I had this realization actually maybe more money isn’t going to make me any happier.
And so the first step was to move to Dubai, I have been coming to Dubai for quite some time and it felt like a happy space for me. You know the weather was good the people were positive there was just a nice energy about Dubai. And then I had to really look quite deeply within myself, I thought what would make me happy and what did I want to spend the rest of my life doing?
So around 18 months ago I sat with a pen and paper, I knew giving was going to be the main drive behind the next project I did, and at the same time I knew that we needed to make it a product based style just because that’s what I was familiar with so I wanted to do something that I already had experience in, that I was good at.
And then that was kind of it. I was trying to find a product that I felt would be accessible to everybody. You know obviously the idea was centered around giving, but then charity is something that a lot of people want to do but maybe don’t normally do. It gets to the end of the month and you’ve got bills to pay and things to do and sometimes charity is left to the last resort.
So I really wanted to come up with something a bit disruptive whereby we could do fashion but do this disruptive business model where we can give back from every item that we sell. So that’s how we ended up coming up with The Giving Movement.
HBA: The Giving Movement is a sustainable brand that is produced locally within the UAE, correct?
DNB: Yeah one hundred percent. Absolutely everything is independently certified sustainable. We went through great lengths; I spent three months visiting lots of different yarn suppliers to look, because obviously you know there are people these days that can just pay for certificates and it not really be truly sustainable, so we went to visit all of these places around the world and then ended up with what are the most reputable suppliers of the yarn. We make everything in the UAE.
HBA: Why is it important to you to found a brand where sustainability is a core value?
DNB: Because I think it is important as a brand to have integrity. If we say we are giving, we want to make sure that we are giving from every item. We are called The Giving Movement and if we say we are sustainable we think that we should be able to uphold that and stay true to that.
Because I think there is nothing worse than being misled from a brand perspective. And I think from a just from a global perspective, especially post-Covid I think we have all had a chance to reassess what is important in life and that life can be quite fragile and that we should start making better choices.
I think what really surprised me when I got into this project, as someone quite new to the fashion industry 18 months ago from a business perspective, was how easy it actually is to make sustainable products now with the innovations that have come in fabrics, to make fabrics out of recycled water bottles and organic bamboo that is sustainably grown and certified. It just shocks me that so few brands have actually done this especially the bigger ones, you know, your fast fashion brands.
HBA: How did you decide to support Dubai Cares and Harmony House by donating a portion of the proceeds from The Giving Movement’s sales?
DNB: I think before I knew that it was going to be a clothing brand, I knew that it was going to be about giving back. I was looking at what was my purpose for the project was going to be and I guess, in a way, what was my own purpose going to be because I was going to be putting all my time and energy into this.
When I started out, what frustrated me was that for the first 18 years of my life I came from a working class background and I saw this huge disparity between the rich and the poor. It always felt unfair and so my frustration led me to think and I actually wanted to create some sort of new education system that would teach people about business and things that you just don’t get taught about the true aspects of business and how to run a business as an entrepreneur.
And so my initial idea was to come up with a program or education to help younger people get the experience they need in order to be successful. Because I just felt there was so much that I learnt at school that was irrelevant compared to what I learnt in the first seven years of my career. But then, when I was doing that research I started to look at what the major problems were in the world and it turned out to be hunger.
And being very privileged here in Dubai and when I lived back in the UK, we forget that in a large space of the world, I think nearly 10% of the world, people are undernourished or starving. And so I had seen this information and it kind of shocked me and I thought well, I don’t need to worry about creating my own education system — we need to try to look after these people who are really in urgent need of support.
And so when I was looking at different charities, especially local ones, I realised okay of course it’s fine to give clothes or to give money to someone, but the reason I chose Dubai cares and Harmony House is that they focus on education as well as giving food and the basic human needs.
The idea of focusing on education really appealed to me because if you can educate a group of children who would otherwise be uneducated for all of their life, they have a much better chance of raising themselves above below the poverty line.
HBA: You launched your brand at the beginning of the pandemic. What sort of challenges did you face as a new business? How did you work to overcome them?
DNB: We launched 22nd April and it was 24/7 lockdown. I think the biggest challenge from a personal perspective was wanting to launch a project when so many people were having such a difficult time. That left me with a bit of internal confusion and it gave me some concerns about, is it really appropriate to be trying to sell something even if it is supporting a charity during this time, when everyone’s lives were changing quite drastically. So that was one of the biggest challenges on a personal perspective.
From an operational perspective we had to get all of the products into the warehouse from the factory, we had to get them distributed so this was a huge challenge for us.
But on the contrasting side the benefit of it was that most people were at home and so we were able to promote our products through social media.
HBA: We’ve been seeing a lot of influencers sporting your brand’s pieces. Can you discuss The Giving Movement’s marketing strategy at all?
DNB: We have done zero influencer gifting so the individuals who were posting had bought into the brand. And we have seen a lot of the influencers big and small buy from us whether that’s 10,000 followers or 3 to 4 million followers, so we have never done a single influencer gift yet.
Our strategy is very much based around paid advertising on social media. That’s just to get the exposure because I guess, from our perspective if you look at our advertising, we are not very hard sales in terms of we aren’t saying ‘Shop now, Buy this or This is Discounted.’ We are just trying to raise awareness about an alternative product which is sustainable, ethical and for a good cause. And so I think that people have aligned to that as especially in this region as something that is not really done anywhere else.
HBA: Season Two Liquid Shine was recently released. How is it different from Season One?
DNB: We are constantly trying innovate the fabric. Once you have used recyclable yarn there’s then lots of things you can do in terms of the the ways its constructed, or the way that you finish it.
Now that’s really through an extra brushing processes, and that can really alter the actual feel of the product and so we have been constantly developing to make it as soft as possible because we believe, as well as for an athleisure product, not just an active wear product that you want to be comfortable in it.
Sometimes I think gym wear can feel a bit sticky and you can tell when you’re wearing it. Whereas what we have done is try to create a surface finish that feels really comfortable for any occasions and not just for the gym.
The Liquid Shine was just from an aesthetic perspective. It is completely organic — we don’t do any chemicals. The way we get the shine is, we simply press the surface of the fabric so it’s exactly the same as our soft skin fabric, but when you apply a press and then polish it with no chemicals, just natural by hand polish it with a machine, it creates that shiny affect which I think is quite a nice upcoming trend of a leather look, trying to merge the leathery looks with active wear.
HBA: What’s next for The Giving Movement? What comes after Season Two?
DNB: So we launched around two weeks ago our real loungewear collection which is unisex. We have done men’s and women’s in nine colours. There’s a lot of autumn winter colours built in there as well as some pop colours and some neutrals. And that’s just completely taken us to a completely different area of growth, so we are 90% up month on month.
The athleisure is really a key area for us moving forward. We are dropping inclusive sizing so we are going up to size 22UK for women which is the equivalent of XXXL and the same for guys. We believe that’s just part of our universal values and ethics. We did want to do it from the start, we just had certain constraints with budget whereas now that we are a little bit further down the line, we have got the ability to go into inclusive sizing.
We just dropped our second collection of modest wear which is something that is really important to me because I feel it’s a really underserviced market in the active wear space. You have a couple of brands such as Nike and Adidas doing very basic gym wear but I don’t really feel as though anybody has come in and tried to disrupt that space where you can make it fashionable.
Whereas if you look at our Instagram feed you can see girls wearing it with oversized blazers as well as the Hijab…just creating a product that can be suitable for lunch as well as the gym. Within a few weeks we’re coming out with children’s wear that matches the male and female products.
For more information visit thegivingmovement.com