Community Clothing X Joanie is here! We’re sitting down with Great British Sewing Bee judge and founder of Community Clothing Patrick Grant to learn more about his brand and the new collaboration range.

Hi Patrick! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your brand, Community Clothing?

Hi! I’m Patrick Grant. I’m the founder of Community Clothing and a judge on the Great British Sewing Bee.

The idea behind Community Clothing is really simple: we work with amazing British factories making super quality clothes that we think everybody can afford.

What led you to start Community Clothing?

Having worked in clothing for about 15 years or so, I found out that one of the suppliers I had been working with was shutting down. I loved the staff there - some amazing craftspeople - some of whom had been working there for their entire lives.

I thought that I needed to do something about it, so I did. I bought the factory, and I started thinking about how we could build a business to keep factories like this one alive, preserve them and celebrate them.

Eventually I came up with the idea for Community Clothing. There are loads of amazing factories in the UK, and most of them have loads of spare capacity. I knew that people in this country would really love to buy great quality clothes that are made out of the very best materials and support British jobs and support communities around the UK that really need the work.

What makes Community Clothing different from the other high-end labels that use the same factories as you?

We appreciate that there is a certain price that people are generally willing to pay for their clothing, and in order to have the maximum impact, we knew that we had to sell the clothes at a price that was as close to the High Street prices that people are used to as possible. So we had to build a business model that allowed us to do that - how do you sell the very best clothing in the world at a price people can afford? You have to think differently, and that’s what we do.

We built a business model that cuts out all the normal costs of doing business. When you shop with community clothing, you’re paying for the clothing. You’re not paying for expensive marketing, you’re not paying for thousands of new collections every year, you’re not paying for expensive shops or fashion shows in the desert or Kardashians or anything else - you’re just paying for great clothes.

We built this model in the simplest possible way with the express intention of making sure that when you buy something from us, it’s great quality, but it’s also affordable - that’s the real ‘secret sauce’ behind community clothing.

What makes Joanie a good fit for a collaboration range?

Well, I know Lucy, who founded Joanie. We’re friends, and I have a great respect for what she’s done. I love the brand, I think she’s done an amazing job in creating something that provides a lot of joy for so many people, and I think that’s a fantastic thing.

So, what have we done together for the Community Clothing X Joanie collection? Well, we’ve taken a couple of our very best selling products, and we’ve Joanie’d them! In fact, Joanie have Joanie’d them. They are designed by Joanie using Joanie’s fits, but they are made in our amazing factories here in the UK.

Can you tell us a bit more about the Community Clothing X Joanie styles? What makes this collection special?

We’ve got a couple of simple product types: we’ve got some lightweight single jersey T-shirts and some slightly heavier-weight classic Breton t-shirts with long sleeves. The Bretons come in a range of super colours, they’re very classic-looking, and the T-shirts are in some amazing, jolly, super-fun stripes - who doesn’t love an amazing, jolly, super-fun stripe? We all do, obviously!

What’s different about the Community Clothing X Joanie products from the normal Joanie range? It’s how and where it’s made. The entire collection is designed and made in the UK. We start with the very finest cotton, which is spun in Manchester, knitted down the road in Leicester, and cut and sewn in north London.

Why is promoting circularity within the fashion industry so important?

At Community Clothing, we’re not just about making great clothes. We’re about trying to encourage people to keep those clothes for longer, to cherish every piece of clothing they have, to value the textile because every bit of everything we wear - certainly in our clothes - is made with great materials by people with great skill, and all of these things should have a value to us.

It’s important that, as people, we start to remember that and think about our clothes as things we want to live with for a long time. The longer we live with our clothes, at least I think, the more valuable they become. They pick up stories along the way, when you wear them, your clothes should get better - they should age in a way that gives them more character, they should become more comfortable, and that only comes if you make good clothes out of good materials.

The quality of our jersey is fantastic. We use a slightly heavier jersey than most people, which means that firstly, your t-shirt will feel more substantial, but crucially it will last longer.

Keeping our clothes for a long time, wearing them for a long time, making them last a long time is incredibly important because whatever environmental impact the production process has - and every production route has an environmental impact - the more you wear it, the more you divide that impact over time.

Shop the Community Clothing X Joanie collection online now!