The beloved judge of The Great British Sewing Bee, Patrick Grant, joined a range of sustainability experts at The Wellbeing Farm in Bolton for B-Corp Fest on World Environment Day (5 June), writes Donna Richardson.
The founder of Community Clothing, based in Blackburn, had a great deal to say about fast fashion at the event, which helped businesses learn more about the B-Corp movement and how to conduct business as a force for good.
Community Clothing is a prime example of a firm putting purity over profit. Its outspoken founder was dressed in trainers from Bolton, socks from West Sussex, trousers, and a T-shirt from Blackburn, as he spoke on World Environment Day. He is a walking example of someone who practices what he preaches.
Patrick is an outspoken advocate for radical change in the fashion and clothing industry,
for moving beyond sustainability to circularity and regeneration. Patrick’s career in fashion has spanned almost two decades. In that time he has rebuilt the Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons, relaunched E. Tautz, for which he won Menswear Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards, and built the most successful designer collaboration in Debenham’s history with Hammond & Co. He has worked with some of the world’s best known brands including Cartier, Rolls Royce, Lotus, BMW, Mercedes, The Macallan, Chivas Regal, Barbour, Christian Louboutin, and Alexander McQueen.
After joining as a Designer for Debenhams and now founder of this sustainable and affordable clothing firm, is one of those people. Community Clothing provides ethical and quality clothing that last. Garments are spun, woven, dyed, knitted and sewn in factories across England, Scotland and Wales. Indeed, Patrick saved Blackburn-based Cookson & Clegg from collapse in 2016. He spoke on the day about the benefits of using business as a power for good.
He told the audience: “More than half of the things we use every day used to be made in Britain. From the big stuff like cars, washing machines, and TVs, to the small things like toothbrushes, everything was made here. Most of the companies that produced those items employed people who lived in the same communities where their businesses were located.
“At the end of the first industrial revolution, over 80 per cent of businesses in Lancashire were owned by people who lived here. That meant there was a surplus profit, which went straight back into the loop to help local enterprises and to fund hospitals, schools, almshouses, and colleges. The money circulated within the local economy, creating additional opportunities for regional economic growth.
“When I was born in 1972, we bought clothes in shops that were mostly still, at that point, made in factories in this country. Marks and Spencer (M&S) sold 20 per cent of all the clothes we bought. Probably most of us in this room, at one point in time, wore a pair of M&S socks. They have always prioritised the quality.
“They had deep relationships with the people. Many of the companies were local and in many cases owned a percentage of the companies where they manufactured their goods. The interesting thing about the way we made our clothes then versus now was that all of the money was distributed where we spent it.
When I was born in 1972, we bought clothes in shops that were mostly still, at that point, made in factories in this country.
Patrick Grant Community Clothing
“So we bought things from shops like M&S, which were pretty much in every town. They paid businesses, which in turn paid rates, which were then distributed to local people, who paid rent, all of which flowed back into the local economy.
“The clothes they sold were made in factories in the UK. Those factories paid business rates, local taxes, and rent. They employed people, who in turn paid insurance and income tax. In essence, all of their profits and the income earned by people were spread around the country. Almost all of the money that you spent on your clothes stayed within the local economy; it circulated around.”
“For almost all of the history of commerce, we bought things from the people who made them. That relationship was direct, with positive benefits. The money you spent went to the person you bought off. There was nobody else sifting off a bit of extra cream for themselves.
“Nowadays, when you shop with Shein or Amazon, very little of the money that you’re spending flows back into the UK economy.
“We’ve moved from a time when things we created distributed economic benefits to a system where the financial benefits are limited.
“We have sleepwalked into a situation where our money is no longer doing good in the world.
“Would you rather give your money to Jeff Bezos and see him use it to send a bunch of morons into space – not even real space mind, just quite high up.
“Or would you like to see your money flow into local businesses? I know I’d rather it go to a bloke called Jeff who might make something for a living with his hands and lives down the road.
“We have sleepwalked into a situation where people’s money is no longer doing good in the world.
Patrick Grant, Founder of Community Clothing
“Typically, between 10 and 25 per cent of the money you spend goes to those who made the goods, and the rest is put into other people’s pockets.
“That hasn’t led to any improvements in the quality, which is in extraordinary decline. The incentive is not to make a good thing, but to encourage people to buy as much as they possibly can. That is all businesses’ raison d’être: to get bigger, sell more and create more profits.
“We can’t stop H&M and Zara from carrying on flogging us even more stuff. They are launching 2000 new products a day, but as a consumer, you can’t possibly keep up with their mountains of newness.
“It is a very deliberate ploy to keep you locked into this cycle of buying. Does buying make your life better or happier, or wealthier?
“None of this is doing you any good. All it is doing is making you anxious and depressed, and it’s deliberate.”
Nine years ago, Patrick started Community Clothing to create a business that gave people a choice. It was born out of a need to buy something that feels good, lasts, and fits nicely, and isn’t made from materials that harm the planet or spend a million years in a landfill when we discard it.
“We realised that around the country, there are brilliant factories that know how to make high-quality clothes.
The problem with the regular clothing industry model is that you can’t make them in the UK, not at a price that most people could afford it.
“Still, you can’t charge a price that’s too high, even if the materials are costly, so if we were to achieve our goal, which was to produce good clothes and create decent jobs, we knew that we had to sell them at an affordable price.
We didn’t want to do what everybody else was doing, which was selling expensive UK-made stuff that wasn’t going to change anything.
The price was important, making it in the UK was essential, and producing a good product was crucial. How can you make something in the UK that’s expensive and sell it at an affordable price?
Well, you have to get rid of all the chunks in the middle, you have to take away all those other noses that are in that trough.
In our model, 65% of every pound you spend goes on manufacturing the goods. Out of £100 would you rather spend £65 on making it or would you rather spend £25 spent on making it and £40 go to a Kardashian. Most businesses spend more money trying to sell you something **** than they do on making the thing in the first place. For us, it was pretty simple: why not create something good that people like, and let them feel the quality of it, and let that be enough?
Let us return to a model where creating something of value and selling it at a fair price was a viable business model.
There are four Ps of marketing, one of which is product, and that’s the one most companies in the clothing industry have given up on. I’m pleased to say Community Clothing measures its success primarily by measuring the amount of work we create, so from the very beginning, we track the hours of work we make in the factories that we work with.
So, at the last count, which was at the end of December last year, we created just over 450,000 hours of work in the UK.
I recall when we reached 10,000 hours of work, and I was thrilled. When we got to 100,000 hours, I was over the moon. Now, we’re getting close to half a million, and it proves that it does work.
We have gone past 100,000 customers in the nine years we’ve been going. We sell a lot of stuff that’s made around here, you know, and people who buy our stuff like the stuff.
That is a recipe for success in the modern world. We produce a high-quality product that performs reliably for an extended period. We don’t create a product that you hope somebody will put in the bin in three weeks and replace with something else. You make a good product that you want that is going to last in somebody’s wardrobe for 10 years, and then when they get bored of it, it’s going to be sold second-hand, so it’s got another 10 years in somebody else’s wardrobe, and then we add another 10 years to that. We create products that have lasting value and that benefit everybody in the chain.
Fair wages
We make sure that the spinner, the weaver, the dyer, the sewer – everybody is paid and paid well. This means that the value is created downstream.
We are different from the H&Ms, Zara’s, Primark’s and all those companies whose business model is to sell you more stuff this week than they sold you last week?
Typically, between 10 and 25 per cent of the money you spend goes to those who made the goods, and the rest is put into other people’s pockets.
Patrick Grant
Whatever they say about their green agenda, their reason to exist is entirely to encourage you to keep buying their stuff. Because if you stop buying this stuff, they will fail. So they have to keep pushing you to do more. When I was born, there were two sides to the stuff that we wore. There were fashionable and everyday clothes. Both existed independently. For instance, M&S sold you clothes, and Vivian Westwood did fashion. The two coexisted very nicely. Then, about 30 years ago, M&S began selling fashion.
The industry is creating mountains of stuff that nobody wants.
There will never be a time when the Vivienne Westwood pirate trousers are not going to be snapped up on eBay or Vinted, or the M&S wool jumper made in the 1980s will not get snapped up on Vinted or eBay.
Nobody wants second-hand Primark; they’re making crap that nobody wants. Many young people buying and selling on Vinted are considering the resale value of the items they purchase, which is brilliant because we create things that have long-term value. That is terrific. Right now, there are over 100 million pieces of Zara on sale on Vinted. That’s gone up 5 million in the last couple of months. H&M is nearly at 100 million. We are creating mountains of stuff that nobody wants.
Your business wants to succeed by making things that people want because that’s what we’re doing. What else do we measure? The positivity people send back to us.
When you do something good, people want to tell you about it and share it, so we receive lots of positive messages, emails, and letters sent to me, as well as on Trustpilot. With a 4.8 score folk really like what we’re doing. We spent 11 per cent of our turnover on all of our sales and marketing activity as a new, growing clothing brand.
The savings from that allow us to do all the good things that we do.
Good deeds spread by word of mouth
How do people find us? Word of mouth. If they’re buying from somebody they care about, they’re likely to buy it for their friends to tell their friends about. Social enterprises and B Corps have a level of commitment from their supporters that is significantly greater than that of traditional businesses. When Debenhams went bust overnight. I lost most of my money and certainly all of my income. I had to find a new way to finance Community Clothing because I was previously funding it with Debenhams’ money. We found a private equity buyer and liked what they were doing, and in November of last year, we managed to buy it back. We needed more money, and so we decided to run a crowdfunding campaign last week, which only lasted 46 hours. We managed to raise all the money we set as our absolute maximum target in under 2 days, because our community wants us to succeed. They want to support a business that does good things. So, if your business is doing good things, you know that people are more likely to support it now.
In my book, Buy Less, I have a list of businesses that make good stuff, where the money that you spend is going directly to that manufacturer, so companies who have factories or workshops, they can be tiny, they can be pretty significant. Still, they’re all businesses where you know where your money is going. Consumers in the UK, specifically British citizens, are starting to realise that their cash holds significant power.
How do we change this broken system?
Every single person has the power to do it by just thinking about where they spend their money. Where do you want your money to go? You can spend it in any way you like.
Materials organise the list in my book because I was once a materials scientist, so it includes categories like wood, clay, and metal. It’s all about choosing to buy things that have meaning.
In the current mode of consumption, we buy loads of stuff that we don’t need. We are filling our wardrobes with junk. It doesn’t bring us any happiness. In the world of clothing, 2/3 of what we buy, we never wear anyway, we’re just conned into buying this stuff.
Community Clothing aims to switch off the brain to the 10,000 adverts we hear each time we open our phones, listen to the radio, or watch TV. We’ve been sold stuff all the time that promises a better life, but the way we feel happy is by living with things that have meaning to us.
We do it a bit more with the food that we buy. Who here occasionally buys a £4.50 loaf of sourdough – that’s good. It’s made with flour from Yorkshire and I am delighted to spend three times as much money as I can savour it. I think about where it’s come from. “It’s got meaning to it. I caution buying fewer things and having better things. Have things that have meaning to you. That way happiness lies.
“We’ve been measuring happiness as a country for 50 years as the more stuff people have and the richer we get and the higher GDP goes, the happiness index doesn’t change at all. In America, it’s gone down.
Big changes are happening. The rise of second-hand sales is enormous. It’s becoming very fashionable to buy stuff second-hand, and that’s a good thing. It’s becoming trendy to turn your back on all that crap. Cool kids are like I’m having nothing to do with that. There will be a time when people will be embarrassed to be seen with a Shein parcel. I am not preaching converted. This Bank Holiday Monday, I bought a Qualcast Concorde electric mower that’s over 50 years old and it’s still going strong. I purchased a Black and Decker, which blew out over six months. Why do we replace a good thing that has served it for years, with a piece of garbage which will stop working soon after you buy it.
I did This Morning when I launched the book last year, and Cat Deeley and Ben Shepherd were talking about the culture, the news, at least a century ago, as a bad thing that was happening. Things have gotten considerably later that day, there’s a chap on her Instagram posting about every piece of clothing that she’s wearing. It’s about creating an economy that works for everyone. We could have a big thriving economy that sells 10% of the amount of physical stuff we just you know just charged 10 times more but the money do loads of good. It begins with less but better, rather than a large volume of garbage. We work with makers in Sheffield who take old festival tents and create bags and waterproof jackets. It’s all about the world saying it’s cool to wear a pair of trainers made from recycled plastic bottles. Fashion is a positive move forward, all of that work. Made in Glasgow, made in Sheffield, made in Leeds – we are all about local products.
Repair and mend
Repair is another trend that’s on the rise. We got out of the habit of repairing because the new stuff was so cheap. If the telly goes on the blink why would you phone Gary in Barnoldswick and drive down there after chasing him for a couple of weeks drop it off and then come back and get it when you without literally getting off the sofa you could have another one arrive in your living room the next day and lob the other one in the skip. That’s the easy way to do things. But the person who delivers that sees very little of the money you spend, and it’s not doing any good. When something is repaired, he’s buying his component from a local component supplier, which puts money in their pocket, and he’s paying the rent that’s going in somebody else’s pocket.
All that is good. Repair Shop is one of the most watched shows on TV after Sewing Bee, because in Britain, people want to feel connected to something. Our website shows all the local suppliers we work with. It’s an interconnected web of local economic benefits that empowers people to know where their money is going. We will tell you where it is made, down to the town, in some of the factories.
Patrick stayed to watch other events and spoke to Jean Anderson, the founder of One Woman at a Time, which helps women to escape female genital mutilation by empowering them. For instance, every year she takes over old Singer sewing machines, enabling women to create items they can sell, thus generating an income for their families.
B-Corp Fest highlights
Event organiser Celia Gaze, founder of The Wellbeing Farm, organised every aspect of the festival-style event, which tackled serious topics in a fun way. Her farm was the first event company in the country to achieve B-Corp Certification
Patrick joined other speakers, including local MP for Darwen and Rossendale for Andy McNae, Silent Night’s Angela Moran, Isabel McLennan, Engagement Manager at B-Lab UK,
Celia Gaze, founder of The Wellbeing Farm, one of the first event venues in the country to obtain B-Corp certification and who recently received a recertification score of 108.6, making them one of the highest-scoring hospitality B Corps in the world, said: “It shows just how tough B Corp certification is.”
She organised every aspect of the festival-style event, which tackled serious topics in a fun way but also showed businesses how they can get their own B-Corp certification – a credential awarded by B-Lab UK, which has introduced new standards this April.
B Lab was founded in 2015 and comprises a growing community of businesses that prioritise doing good over profit. The members uphold the highest standards of social and environmental performance. Every B-Corp signs a declaration of interdependence – a mission statement for all B-Corps when they certify, and the community is held together with a shared vision of and a legal commitment to meet high standards of social and environmental performance and to create benefit for all stakeholders.
Currently, the B Corp movement is one of the fastest-growing of its kind, with 2,500 members. It is projected to reach 3,000 by the end of the year, making it the fastest-growing community of certified businesses in the UK. Worth £31.6 billion in total revenue, the B movement in the UK employs 182,000 people.
Celia and Andrew Leeming from Boost Lancashire opened the day, which ran to the theme of ‘Be more womble’ – a nod to the most incredible TV recyclers, who made an appearance, along with the farm’s star, llama attractions. Some of the speakers included Angela Moran, ESG lead for Silent Night Group, Andy McNae, MP for Darwen and Rossendale, Isabel McLennan, Engagement Manager at B-Lab UK, Richard Dickson, Co-founder of Play It Green, Dr Zoe Detko, Founder of Ardrea Eco-innovation, Ian Steel, Keeper of the Flame for Atkinson’s Coffee Roasters, and ESG Director of Silent Night, Angela Moran, as well as Sophie Lee of Electric Peach and Molly Gould, who hosted a fun climate game – people versus the planet.
Celia added: “At The Wellbeing Farm, we’re not just about throwing epic parties (though we do that brilliantly.
“We’re about celebrating consciously – creating events that tread lightly, give back, and uplift communities. A huge thanks to: our incredible team, suppliers, guests, and community — you made this happen.”
At the event, others shared their B-Corp journey. This included Silent Night’s Angela Moran, the beds and mattresses manufacturer located in Barnoldswick, Lancashire, who has just begun their B-Corp journey.
She said, “Two years ago, we chose a partner to help us in our journey, and they recommended a spreadsheet of 132 actions. It took us three months to work through them. In November last year, we applied and are now starting the evaluation process. We hope to be within that 2,500 to 3,000 number you mentioned in the UK.”
Later, a panel consisting of the Keeper of the Flame at Atkinson’s Coffee Roasters, Ian Steel, ESG Director of Silent Night, Angela Moran and Sophie Lee of Electric Peach, who later did a storytelling session about turning your cause into a movement, took place.
The afternoon was divided into sessions, including practical workshops for businesses applying for B Corp accreditation by B Lab UK.
Meanwhile, Richard Dickson, Co-founder of Play It Green and Dr Zoe Detko, Founder of Ardrea Eco-innovation, a low carbon specialist, hosted a workshop to help businesses understand how Sustainability is Good for Business, not just for the planet.
Overall, the day sparked dozens of sustainability conversations and debates between organisations. There was a wonderful vegan lunch and everyone who attended received a goodie bag of sustainable goods, including handmade wooden candle holders hand-turned by Celia’s 90-year-old dad. Celia is the chair of One Woman at a Time, a charity founded by Jean Anderson, which helps empower women to say no to FGM and a raffle was held on the day to help raise money for the cause.
The afternoon included various sessions and workshops that businesses could rotate around. Llama treks also took place, using the same friendly creatures that take part in weddings at the farm, . After the raffle was drawn and cocktails were served, the event came to a close. It was a huge success, and attendees found it insightful. Celia’s mentor, Victor Giannandrea, Entrepreneur in Residence at Lancaster University and Honorary Teaching Fellow, was also in attendance.
One of the attendees, James Grimshaw from Sustainable Energy First, a certified B Corp, said: “We’ve been involved with the B Corp movement for over three years now. It’s the second year at this event. It is always good to meet with the wider community, hear from businesses and share those experiences with our colleagues. It has been a great day.”
Speaking after the event, Celia, who did plenty of research for the event, attending Anthropy at The Eden Project and ChangeNow in Paris, said: “I’m still buzzing from B Corp Fest. It was such a feel-good, purpose-packed day full of inspiring speakers, community spirit and loads of laughs – especially when the llamas met the wombles.
“I’m so grateful to everyone who came, supported, donated and got stuck in. It really showed what can happen when people and businesses come together to make a difference.
“I’ve come away with about 30 new ideas. I’m already planning how to make B Corp Fest 2026 even bigger and bolder.”
Evidence of good is all around the farm, the community food bank to the new book ‘library’ at the bottom of the drive near the entrance on Plantation Road.
Celia, who launched a national Conscious Day on 13 March, is now branching out into other conscious events. They celebrated life in April, and wedding enquiries. The Wellbeing Farm is one of the leading venues in Lancashire for weddings. Their resident llamas add a touch of fun to weddings and special occasions, making the day truly memorable. After all, the llamas in their bow ties are what put the farm on the map.
The next big event on the calendar is WEDFEST: PRIDE in your Wedding Festival on 29 July. Before that is Life’s a Drag, which will bring drag queens to the sleepy town. It’s all going on at The Wellbeing Farm, a night of cabaret, comedy and fun featuring Diana DoGood and food.
The upcoming events can be found here
