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People Tree are based in the UK and,have an online store, although their products are only stocked in stores in the UK and Europe. They care about garment worker ethics as well as using sustainable processes for making the products. As they put it (much more eloquently), “For every beautiful garment People Tree makes, there’s an equally beautiful change happening somewhere in the world.”
Most of the cotton is fair trade and organic, and all of the dyes used are safe and natural. They source locally and choose natural materials over synthetics. They reduce their carbon emissions by employing handcraft techniques rather than machinery.

They work with 50 fair trade groups in 15 different countries in order to benefit as many people as possible. The groups are involved not just in making the products, but in crop growing, dyeing, weaving and more.

To provide as much trade as possible, People Tree prefer to design items with extra features and employ techniques done by hand instead of machine, like weaving, knitting and embroidery.

Here’s an excerpt from their site, about one of the communities they are helping:

“If you’re born to the ‘pode’ caste in Nepal, you are expected to clean the sewers and streets of the areas inhabited by higher castes. In return, you will be paid a pittance – sometimes no more than scraps of left-over food.

The Kumbeshwar Technical School in Kathmandu provides education, vocational training, and then paid employment to these most underprivileged of people. In the six years since People Tree became involved with KTS, the group of knitters and dyers has grown from 15 to over 240.

People use the money they earn to educate their children at the KTS primary school (which People Tree funds 50% of), which is something that they could never have dreamed of previously.”

Source: Heidi & Seek
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