UAE-born sustainable brand The Giving Movement gets charitable
In the regional fashion industry, a handful of brands and organizations have been putting forth new initiatives that aim to give back to the community. For its part, The Giving Movement, an athleisure brand founded by Dominic Nowell-Barnes in Dubai in 2020, donates $4 of each sale to charity.
Since its inception, the sustainable label has quickly gone on to become a staple in the wardrobes of social media influencers across the region and was picked up by several e-retailers such as Ounass and Sivvi. But perhaps its biggest accomplishment to date is raising more than $1,000,000 in donations for local charities Dubai Cares and Harmony House India.
“When I started The Giving Movement, it was all about trying to find fulfillment and to feel that maybe in five, 10 years, when I look back at where I’ve put my time and energy, it has had a positive impact,” Nowell-Barnes told Arab News.
“Dubai Cares is predominantly * focused on education, so the idea is that if you can educate people then they have the ability to get jobs and make a better future for themselves. And then with Harmony House, they focus on the kind of immediate needs of providing food and shelter, and then ultimately education,” explained the founder.
The concept of giving back is personal to Nowell-Barnes.
“Growing up in the north of England, I got to see very different types of lives. You can be walking down one street and there will be a guy driving a Ferrari, and the next minute you can be walking down a street where there are people living on the sidewalk. This was my earliest recollection of feeling like life can be unfair to people,” he reflected.
Despite launching at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, in April 2020, the made-in-UAE brand met with success, which NowellBarnes attributes to people wearing activewear and loungewear more than ever.
The Giving Movement only utilizes fabric that is either certified recycled or organic as well as low-impact dyes. Eventually, the brand wants to move into circularity by launching an initiative to collect customers’ used garments for recycling.