Idea 399 of 500. Cluster 20: Design, fashion and the apparel spillover
A fashion school linked to the factories, so the designers do not have to leave
The mechanism, from the book
Sri Lankans make the world's underwear to the world's standard, and the country has no fashion brand of its own that the world has heard of.
Every idea in cluster 20 uses this mechanism.
A first step
Ask the HR managers at two apparel factories whether they would take design students for paid placements and hire the best, and write down their answers. Then run a 4-week evening design course for 12 school leavers or factory workers, taught by a working designer, for a fee. Enrolments and a factory's promise of placements are your proof.
- Who pays first
- A school leaver who wants to design clothes, whose family would pay for a course that ends in a placement at a factory at home.
- What leaves today
- Designers leave the island to learn and to work; a school linked to the factories keeps the talent where the production already is.
The idea and the mechanism are from the book. The first step was written for this site as a suggestion; if you know a better one, say so.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
The only test any idea on this site has to pass. The four rules that go with it are here.
In the book
- Ch. ThreeWhat We Have Already Built
MAS and Brandix: the world's first green apparel factories
More from cluster 20
- 396A Sri Lankan lingerie and swimwear brand, since the factories that make everyone else's are here
- 397Sportswear brands using the technical fabric and the cutters that already exist
- 398Batik and handloom in contemporary fashion, sold in London and Tokyo, not only at the airport
- 400Surplus and off-cut businesses: the factories' waste as a design material
- 401Furniture design in coconut timber, rubberwood and rattan, for export
- 402Interior-design firms serving the villa and hotel owners, with the products sourced from this list
Idea 399 of the 500 in the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? Every one can be started by one person, one family or one small firm.