Just about everybody is now ‘back-to-school’. After the trauma of the ‘kitting out’ where sulky or terrified children are kitted out with school uniform items, with or without their cooperation, comes the next stage – the losing, destroying or rejecting the clothing that has cost so much time, money and tears.

One way to help your child through this stage, and to help the planet too, is to educate them about organic clothing and get them involved in thinking about how their clothing is made, why a uniform is worn and how they can benefit the environment by choosing organic options for themselves and maybe even getting a school-wide campaign going to support the wearing of organic cotton items such as organic T-shirts for PE or performing groups like school bands who can be outfitted in organic cotton clothing in a very cost-effective fashion.

Online retailers are now a great way to outfit children in eco-friendly clothing for a very reasonable price.  Knowing that their clothing is benefiting the planet can often help children, especially fashion-conscious ones, become reconciled to a uniform they hate because if they are teased by their friends about wearing the school issue uniform, such as white polo-shirt and navy trousers, they can say ‘Well okay, it’s not stylish, but it is organic and that means it’s preventing the use of pesticides, and stopping people in the developing world being exposed to toxic chemicals.’

Looked at in this way, a plain white T-shirt becomes a statement about caring for the planet and can remove a lot of the stigma that children feel if they don’t have the most up to date fashions, because they can assert that they are choosing to toe the line with organic clothing items for ethical reasons and that anybody who tries to tease them for it is simply showing their own selfishness and lack of care about the world in general.

For the environmentally conscious child, this can become a major issue in accepting the role of uniform as a sustainable way of not wasting clothing or going to unnecessary expense to attend school, and that can give the ‘green child’ a real boost in getting back into the school routine. And it can stop the loss and damage to school items that would otherwise be dropped, cut, abandoned or otherwise rejected.

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It doesn’t matter whether you’re a primary school that needs to invest in some team uniforms or a multinational organisation that supplies uniform wear to all its staff, everybody is feeling the pinch these days.

There are some simple tips to help you get the best from your budget and from your clothing supplier:

Check what you’ve done before

Quite often companies and organisations don’t keep track of the necessary information relating to budgets – they know what they spent and when they spent it, but not exactly what they spent it on. So, for example, a regular December expenditure for a school goes unnoticed until somebody sits down and works out that every year, the charity carol singers have to wear high-visibility tabards and every year, new ones get ordered because nobody’s remembered to gather up last years and store them safely so that in ten months time, you can simply work out how many more you need, and order a few, not a complete repeat order.  For businesses, this can also be important – knowing that every summer you have to order a large number of short-sleeved shirts for staff working in sunny offices means that you can plan ahead and talk to your supplier to get the best discounts and delivery dates, instead of ordering in a rush and ending up with garments arriving late or having to pay premium delivery rates.

Plan promotional activity in advance

It’s best to work six months in advance – most companies have regular promotions, perhaps in summer, perhaps to coincide with a client need. So if you supply portable air-conditioning, don’t wait until June to organise your T-shirts and flyers to promote your business, get on top of the order in December, map out your strategy and ensure that you’ve negotiated the best discounts you can. Quite often, if you can plan ahead, your clothing supplier or printer will be able to offer you a better deal because their cash-flow is much more secure, knowing that your advance order is in the bag.

Use every opportunity to promote your business

If your school is holding a fund-raising event, or your business is doing something for Comic Relief, don’t simply send out a press release and leave it at that, ring your local TV and radio stations and ask them to come along – quite often, if it’s a slow news day, you’ll get fantastic live coverage of your event, and as long as your staff or students are all wearing their uniforms, lots of free publicity too!

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Uniforms, whether in the workplace or at school, are really fantastic for building team spirit, allowing the public to identify a group or brand, and wonderful for shaping a business, sporting team or school ethic.  But uniforms are expensive too, and keeping a large staff in uniform can send a businesses costs soaring.

There’s another element to consider, as well as a uniform policy needing to be sustainable, it has to be at least as ethical as the company’s own corporate policy – so, for example, if the company says it will treat customers well and suppliers fairly, it can’t afford to have uniform items that are sourced from sweatshops.

What’s the answer? Well one simple solution is to select uniform items that can be easily laundered, and to ensure that those items are sustainably sourced, produced and transported.  Ethically produced organic cotton T-shirts for example, overprinted with your brand or company message, can be both cost effective and a powerful marketing tool. If T-shirts are too informal for your company, organic cotton polo-shirts are smarter and just as much a bargain. And they have another advantage – both tee and polos are unisex, so that you can outfit your staff more easily whether they are male or female.

And by the same measure the ‘community service’ brand is about to get a high profile boost. The Home Office has ordered 10,000 orange tops for offenders to wear while they are doing their community service in England and Wales – the high-visibility clothing bears the slogan “Community Payback” to show the public that community-based punishments do actually get carried out by offenders. Would a similar technique work for your staff? If you have dog-walkers, gardeners, a team putting up fencing or something similar, could you turn bad weather to your advantage by showing your brand on high-vis outerwear?

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