Made in Australia, from start to finish
Sustainability and locality go together hand in hand. When we talk about sustainability at Wildflower, we’re talking about the holistic process that encompasses everything we do – from ideation to final product – that happens right here in Australia.
Ethical business is the heart of what we do, and it’s one of the core values that drove the conception of Wildflower before we had any product at all! We knew that we wanted to create beautiful garments that supported local makers and didn’t add unnecessary strain on the environment or resources involved.
During the learning phase of our business, one key thing kept coming up: support local. If there’s one way to minimise our environmental footprint, as well as avoiding further corporate damage to the socioeconomical landscape, it’s by bringing business closer to home. Once we learnt this, there was no question about it: Wildflower would be committed to supporting local in everything we do. We’re championing local to drive home ethical business.
So, what’s the benefit? What makes local manufacturing sustainable? And, perhaps most of all, when offshore prices are far more attractive, why choose the moral high road? Let us clear this up:
Keeping operations close to home have huge benefits to the community. By supporting local, we have the opportunity to help many other Australian small businesses. This is a concept that’s become easy to grasp through the devastation and complications of the pandemic. It only takes a moment of reflection to realise how reliant we have become on offshore business – think of all the random things that went missing from the supermarket, or how strained the international postal service became as soon as the pandemic affected borders. It’s amazing how disconnected we are from the products we use and where they come from. By supporting local, we’re reinstalled with a sense of understanding. For example, everything in our Wildflower supply chain happens onshore, including sampling, development, patternmaking, manufacturing, sourcing, and printing, and where possible, all are completed locally in the Gold Coast. You can imagine the sense of closeness we feel with each and every collection we launch! We know every person by name in the supply chain. There’s no high turnover, no cutting costs, and no poor working conditions.
As conscious consumers, we have to remember that locally-made doesn’t come at a higher cost – it comes at a fair cost. If the price of something is too good to be true, well, it probably is too good to be true!
By choosing locally made, Wildflower (and many other clothing manufacturing businesses) have the option to release smaller collections, which makes for higher quality of goods and less garment waste (a major global crisis that contributes to the effects of global warming worldwide). We are also rewarded with an incredible sense of community by building close relationships with local manufacturers, who are masters of their crafts and have so much talent and expertise to share.
There are so many pros to championing local, and as a business that strives to do so, we can’t tell you how rewarding it is. Best of all, our amazing community of workers and customers tell us the same thing all the time: supporting local is awesome! Every local purchase supports someone in your community, every local hire supports someone in your community, and if there’s one thing we know for sure, it’s that community is everything.
