Fredericton’s Wear Your Label Goes International
Wear Your Label, a Fredericton fashion company gone international, wants to eliminate the stigma of mental illness one stitch at a time.
Co-founders Kyle MacNevin and Kayley Reed joined forces while working together for a mental health organization. In facing their own mental health challenges, the two discovered the need to bring conversation about mental health out into the open. They designed Wear Your Label clothing to make it easier for people to talk about mental health by spreading the message visually and sparking conversation.
After starting out by screen-printing shirts themselves in Fredericton to fill five orders per week, Wear Your Label now sells internationally and has entered into an 18 month program at the Joe Fresh Centre for Fashion Innovation. This program gives them access to valuable resources to help build their business – such as mentorship, shadowing, information and equipment.
“It’s a huge step up for us coming from Fredericton, where Kayley and I were twiddling our thumbs about certain things on how to build an international brand, to being able to work with a really successful fashion company like Joe Fresh,” MacNevin said.
Awareness of the Wear Your Label brand grew quickly from May of 2015 when they began to receive international attention after being featured by Today.com. MacNevin explained that before this, much of the awareness of the brand was spread by their network of community champions.
“We have about 50 community champions that range from university students to business leaders to nurses to people who are affected by mental illness but are also a leader and a champion in their local community,” MacNevin said. “Basically that acts as kind of a grassroots movement where they share a lot of our content, they tell our story, they contribute to our messaging.”
Once their story was picked up by the media, Wear Your Label continued to grow steadily. As young entrepreneurs without much business acumen, MacNevin and Reed had to learn as they went when their orders increased from five a week to five hundred. MacNevin explained that they had a lot of support and help along the way. Since then, they’ve been able to start partnering with major mental health organizations.
“We were really strategic about the relationships we began to foster. We started partnering with organizations we admired, these organizations we were looking up to three weeks before,” MacNevin said.
The label also had the opportunity to show their line at New York Fashion Week in September of last year. MacNevin and Reed took this opportunity to showcase not only their clothing but a group of inspiring people they called role models.
“We hired these role models who were not necessarily professional fashion models but they were advocates about mental health and they’re from all over North America. We did an international casting call and had about 700 applicants,” MacNevin said. “It was a fantastic experience and all of those people who applied have still been either followers, supporters, customers or volunteers for the organization.”
MacNevin believes that much of the support Wear Your Label receives is due to the fact that mental illness affects such a large portion of the population. He says that people respond to the company because it resonates so deeply with them on a personal experience level.
“We built a brand that is authentic and that has the same kind of core principles and competencies that people like to see in terms of doing social good, doing business and making a difference in terms of mental health and eradication of stigma,” MacNevin said. “People really like to help us and to hold onto that story and to be loyal.”
MacNevin says that New Brunswick is still a major part of the Wear Your Label brand and how they sustain and build their message. He explains that the label likely wouldn’t have come about had he and Reed not begun in New Brunswick.
“Kayley and I probably would have been kind of impeded to start a business if we lived in Toronto or Montreal or in New York because we were unaware of how many obstacles there are to start a fashion company, let alone start a social enterprise around mental health,” MacNevin said. “Being from Atlantic Canada and being from New Brunswick specifically gave us that positive ignorance to say ‘yeah, of course we can do this. No one’s doing it here. Why not try.’”