The fashion brand that’s giving its profits away

Afashion brand that aims to donate 90 per cent of its profits to charity sounds a bit airy-fairy. But just so that there can be no backsliding, the brand in question is calling itself Ninety Percent. It has just launched, with a focus on what Ben Matthews, its merchandise director, describes as “elevated basics” or “detail driven staples”, the perfect T-shirt in organic cotton, luxurious-feeling oversized cashmere-blend jumpers, slim Lurex knits and casual jersey trousers.

Matthews knows all about luxury basics, having worked at Net-a-porter.com for a decade, and before that at Topshop under the watchful eye of Jane Shepherdson, a woman who had an instinct for merging high fashion with high(er) principles long before it became the strategy du jour. When he and his team brought some samples into our offices, there was much purring over the textures (we love a soft touch), the thoughtful details (the internal seams on the T-shirts are edged in grosgrain) and subtle pastel colours, particularly the dusky nude pinks and pearly greys.

Ninety Percent is 70 per cent sweatshirting and jersey and 30 per cent knitwear, and aimed squarely at a contemporary woman’s need for feelgood utility pieces. They’re not cheap. The oversized knits are £350 and warm enough to wear as a coat. T-shirts are £30 – eight times a bargain basement one. Then again, identical-looking ones from cult designer brands can cost eight times more – and Ninety Percent guarantees all its materials are sourced from best-practice suppliers in China, Turkey, Japan, Italy… this is a global enterprise.

The extreme polarisation of prices across the industry and the fact that there’s often little correlation between quality and the numbers on the swing-tag are two of many reasons why consumers no longer want to pay full ticket for anything. Perhaps Ninety Percent can change this, too. That’s not its chief aim, however.

When customers order an item from the website (to keep costs down it’s only available online) it will come marked with a code which they can key in to check out exactly who made their item. They’ll also be able to choose which charity (including War Child and Wild Aid) they’d like their money to go to – a slick sartorial version of those green tokens they give you at the checkout in Waitrose.

Where is this nirvana based? Mainly in Bangladesh, probably the country most likely to give conscientious consumers second thoughts about purchasing. It’s because this link – between mindful consumption and a country that’s known for churning out cheap clothing destined for landfill – seems so implausible that Ninety Percent could potentially become a significant model for others. “We aim for many of the designs to carry through from season to season“says Matthews. “We have to move away from this idea of inbuilt obsolescence. This is about slowing the system down.”

Ninety Percent is the brainchild of Shafiq Hasan, a successful factory owner in Dakha CK who supplies clothes to M&S, Debenhams, White Stuff and H&M among others.

With 7,000 employees, most of them women, Hassan knows how to make a factory profitable – and it’s not necessarily in the ways that you’d imagine. Many of his staff get free healthcare, meals cooked on site and childcare for under-fives. Look after your workers and they will look after you could be his mantra.

“We had to take a team out to Bangladesh to educate the workers in different techniques and skills,” says Matthews.

“Part of it is about empowering them to take their time so they can aim for a higher quality. That’s something they all seem to find incredibly satisfying.”

There is one niggle: that 90 per cent refers to profits, not turnover. What if it takes several years to make a profit? “Rest assured, we will turn a profit,” says Matthews. “We want to make a difference, and to do that, we’ll need this to be huge.”

‘We want to make a difference, and to do that, we’ll need it to be huge’