Pants to Poverty Ethical Pants

The Pants Story

Well, it’s been a crazy, beautiful, exciting, inspiring and gorgeous journey so far! We started out as the young people’s group from Make Poverty History in 2005. Remember Live8? That massive rally in Edinburgh? Remember the white band that 8 million people bought? Well that’s where we began.

We were inspired by that great man Nelson Mandela’s words when he came to London and said: “Today hundreds of millions of people lie trapped and enslaved in the prison of poverty… it’s time to set them free… Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation. Let your greatness blossom”. So, a little challenge then! We know many of the old ways just don’t work. We know that we’re bloody lucky to be born healthy without the daily torment of man made poverty. We know that the people in power don’t really do much about someone dying every 3 seconds because of the way they run the world. We know that Mandela’s right… the question was… what do we do about it.

We looked into things a little more closely and thought, hang on! That’s pants! Pants to that… Pants to Poverty!!! Ooh, wait a minute…

Suddenly our pants were born! It was before the days of fairtrade cotton and so we found the best supplier we could making organic underwear and from a loan of just £3,000 within a few months we had 12,000 pairs of pants in one of our garages and things started getting exciting… the rest went like this:

By the end of the year we’d sold about 11,000 pairs of pants and knew that we were on to a good thing and that hopefully Nelson would like the blossoms that were growing!!! We made a fair wedge of cash from this and so we spent it all on new ideas for the Make Poverty History campaign – parties against poverty, graffiti against poverty and more! Unfortunately, the Make Poverty History bosses decided to call it a day at the end of the year but we were just starting… we had £3,000 left and so we decided to keep going!

We started working with a new even better supplier and decided to launch our pants at a pants mob in front of the Bank of England in London… We sent out a few emails and the word spread and suddenly 150 people turned up and came panting with us declaring “We love pants! We hate Poverty!”. A mad, mad, mad day that started and ended in the pub with a lot of very happy people knowing that they were part of something special blossoming!

This is where our experimentation phase began… all of us had other jobs and we just wanted to see if people would love these pants as much as our first ones… beautifully they did and without really trying much, over the next 18 months we kept selling out of pants, we began to learn about how most of us don’t realise just how bad out pants are, how badly the people who make our clothes are treated and how simple the solutions really are! More parties, more pants and lots more pub chats later… we decided that we have a responsibility to live up to… we must rid the world of bad pants! Why? Because we can!

In the last year. we’ve started to rack up awards and break records! Check out the little list below:

We’re now selling pants across 16 countries through a network of ethical and independent shops, here on our website and through pant loving groups… we’re working really closely with the best and most ethical suppliers we can find and we’ve got loads of amazing people and companies supporting us… we now even have employees to get all the jobs done! We’re not experimenting anymore, the preparation is over…it’s now time to truly blossom! This is our new website, we’re now a sexy underwear brand! The power now relies does lie in our pants!!!