Who made your shirt?

This is a guest post from Arthur & Henry. We love their shirts and how they do what they do. Perfect for Father's Day!

We are Arthur & Henry and we are saving the world one shirt at a time. We believe in decent working conditions, organic farming, Fairtrade (and indeed fair trade) and beautiful shirts. We like “Who Made Your Pants”, and this is why we like them - producing the right product is not enough, we have to produce it in the right way. We have slightly different social impacts - we focus on the cotton farmers in rural India but at heart we both believe that while revenue and profit is important, and is what sustains us, it is not what drives us. We are both driven by a belief that commerce can be a force for good in this world, not just a mechanism to produce another bauble.

Arthur & Henry started in 2011 because nobody else was doing what we considered to be a truly ethically produced man's shirt, from cotton growing to tailoring, that was smart enough to wear with a suit (you know, with a decent collar and impeccable stitching that sort of thing).

A gap in the market was the start. Some soul searching about what we consider to be “truly ethical” the middle. And the graft of execution, the actual sourcing of cotton, of fabrics & of quality tailors, the end.

Up and running now for a few years now, the challenge now is tracking down the “ethical consumer”. Somebody who sees value in treating people fairly across the supply chain. (Like you lovely people who buy Who Made Your Pants' pants.) We are with ethical fashion in 2015 where we were with free range eggs in the 1990s. The direction is clear people are caring about provenance more and people are caring about quality more.

It will take a generation before it becomes mainstream but, at the risk of sounding pompous, we can’t exist as a society if we can’t even clothe ourselves without doing harm.

Mark Lissaman, www.arthurandhenry.com, Twitter: @arthurandhenry, Facebook: facebook.com/arthurandhenry

For two weeks, Arthur & Henry are offering a special discount of 20% off all shirts with code WMYP20. Buy your dad an organic shirt for Father's Day. (Or maybe just one for you or the man in your life anyway.)