(as told by Amy)
I actually first had the idea when I was in high school, learning how to sew, and I noticed that some of the clothes being put in donation bins wasn't at a quality where someone would be willing to buy them.
I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of being thrown away, the fabric on those clothes were made into something?" But I thought someone else would do it.
Years later, after a year of studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, the idea occurred to me again and I thought, "Why not me?"
So I reached out to the Salvation Army and we started planning the project in Christchurch. Then I told Yilan about the idea and she said that we should bring it to Auckland too!
Those were the first steps of many. I think something I realised through this whole process is that making a vision reality is exactly that, it's not making reality the same as your vision. The idea is a start. The process is many many more ideas, listening to feedback, and learning about things that you never knew before.
Especially when people are at the centre - which I would argue is true about any project - it's about always going back to, "How can we make this work for everyone we are engaging with? What do they need? What will their experience be?" I think that's what we ended up designing more than the products. The items themselves were quite simple. What we really paid attention on was designing the system and the experience.
I think that what you see on these posts will be a testament to that. Hopefully, we'll get the chance to continue to grow and discover more things that will ask those questions of us.
