LEADING THROUGH A TRENDY ENTERPRISE
HOW ONE DEADLY WORD TURNED INTO A FASHION EMPIRE!
Andrew Taylor is a Ballardong Man from the Noongar Nation.
Hear how he is leading the way with a trendy enterprise that is taking school children from trainees to launching their own fashion labels!
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More than just a clothing brand ... The team at Pathfinders caught up with the social entrepreneur changing the world, one student at a time and found out what keeps him moving.
Tell us a bit about you and how you ended up where you are today?
The whole idea for BrothaBoy Clothing came about because years ago I was consulting a job agency (which is now Ausum Initiatives) out in Midland which is a suburb of Perth in Western Australia.
At the time, I was also doing these cool designs on T-Shirts on the weekends. The mob kept coming in and asking for them. There was more people coming into the shop for the T-Shirts then the job stuff so the Manager sat me down and asked what I was doing.
I explained that I had this hobby of making T-Shirt designs and that people were excited to see “BrothaBoy” on a shirt because that style of language really meant something to them. The shirts were done in our language, something we could relate to and it wasn’t available on the market anywhere else with some of the bigger fashion labels.
So we then worked to set up the social enterprise, Brotha Boy Clothing, where we sell the clothes (we have since expanded to a range of marketing and promotional services) in our shop and also online.
The whole thing is run by school-based trainees who are studying for the Cert 2 in Multimedia and Cert 2 in retail. They do everything from design creation, to packing up the orders, to serving customers in the shop. We rely on working with some big corporate clients to then fund the enterprise as well.
We use business and enterprise to engage the youth and create a whole generation of business minded Aboriginal people who participate in real and creative work while they are still at school!
What is your personal mission?
I want the Brothaboy business to be the first point of thought when the words 'Aboriginal Youth' is mentioned in any discussions or in the same sentence across corporate – to give Aboriginal youth a supported pathway through to real jobs and for that pathway to be engaging for them to really get a sense of what they are about.
It is incredible what these students come up with and how this allows them a whole new way to express themselves and to learn about how a business really works.
I have let students express their own creativity – they have me wearing Zip Tees at the moment!!
I’ve never worn a Zip-Tee in my life, they just weren’t m thing – but I am wearing them now because I trust their judgement when it comes to the hottest fashion trends.