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The School Uniform Tailoring Business
The School Uniform Tailoring Business is an idea of widows in the community who expressed a desire to develop their tailoring skills. A proven need for school uniforms in the local market combined with relatively low material costs and technical complexity required to produce uniforms make them an ideal product for the widows to develop a business around.
This program will establish a forum for the widows to learn and develop a vocational skill and secure employment in the sustainable cottage industry they will build. The widows will be vital contributors to the development, marketing and management of the business, which will foster an enhanced sense of ownership and empowerment.
Tropical Focus has experience with projects of this kind with the successful lampshade weaving business they have overseen for the past 3 years.
The program will commence with a three-year startup period in which ten widows will be targeted for training and employment, though expansion before the end of the three-year period is certainly possible and desirable. The targeted widows typically earn $14 per month; at the end of the three-year startup period, the widows are projected to be collecting $100 per month from the program.
The program trains widows in basic tailoring skills and uniform making, supplies basic inputs needed for uniform production, facilitates coordination with the local school uniform market and assists widows in business planning, product marketing and management. The program also includes the construction of a training and factory facility using an existing cement structure on the Tropical Focus property. Finally, ongoing funding for the program will be based on a micro-crediting mechanism, by which participants will be given small loans upon entering into the business.
Sewing machines for the program are in place thanks to the efforts of Katherine Ensign and her St. Mary’s High School classmates and Dean Margee Ensign’s University of the Pacific students, both of Stockton, CA, who raised money for the purchase and transport from the US of three electric/pedal sewing machines.