Where it all started...

(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.

initial brainstorms

how the logo patch came to be