My Ethical Fashion Design Brand

Hello dear friends,

I have decided to give myself a chance at pursuing the thing that makes me the most happy woman in the world: creating beautiful original garments with African Print and creating my ethical fashion brand doing so.  Many of you have seen some of my creations on my facebook page and many of you loved them. 

Before I continue telling you my story, I want to tell you that I have created donation options for you to pre-order creations you want for yourself or loved ones. You can find them at the very bottom of the story :)

When you make a donation, I will contact you to take your measurement and help you choose your fabric via skype webcam. I will be in the production shop, and your garment will be made fresh and fast.

Now, to come back to my purpose: the decision to create fashion professionally and share my gift with the world came to maturity after realizing how popular my designs were with friends and family, and also, with random strangers in the street, who sometimes were fashion industry professional: models, designers or sales professionals, accross cities such as Miami, Kigali, Paris, Montreal, Port-of-Spain, and New York. So, I said to myself, why not? Why not go for what I love? I deserve to love myself and go for just what I want. And now, here I am reaching out to you, and calling out for your help to make this vision come true.

My goal is to create an Ethical Fashion Brand that specializes in creating beautiful garments with African Print, for young women who love to party in flying colors. 

On the ethical aspect of my brand, I concretely mean that my work ethics will be fair to workers and to the environment and that my fashion brand will be socially and economically involved within the communities where it does business for the betterment of their working and living conditions in whatever ways is necessary.

I plan to do production in the Carribeans, and in Africa, and to export to North America.

To achieve this goal, I have decided to travel to Port-of-Spain, in Trinidad-and-Tobago and work with tailors I already know well from a previous small fashion trip. Ideally, I would like to start up by setting up a small fair trade factory down there that would export my garments to the North American Market. The tailors I work with are people of humble means and I want to help create jobs for them and give them stable, full-time, and secure employment that they can rely on to concretely better their lives and those of their family in the long-run. 

However, as an old proverb says: you build a castle one stone at a time. So for this time, my immediate goal is to produce 200 dresses that I can bring back to sell to stores in the U.S. and in Canada, and at fashion trade shows. Some stores in Montreal have already showed a strong interest in my work. and as such, I am very motivated to create and bring my creations to the market. This will also be the time to get my first hands-on experience at selling my craft. And I want you to be a part of this adventure. 

Concretely, this trip will allow me to achieve the following:
- build trust with my workers and put a smile on their face by giving them the opportunity to be paid fairly making beautiful garments where they are the one figuring out the technicalities of my design drawings
- understand garment factory production with the help of my oversees mentors Ai Lin Wan from Singapore and Dr Peter Wilson from the United Kingdom 
- understand how the market responds to my works by seeing how well my fashion collection sells in stores and at trade shows
- understand how the fashion industry works for my niche and make my clientele happy by offering them original creations that they will love
- understand in a practical hands-on way what it means to do business with ethical values and become an expert in ethical fashion business
- make the world a better place by allowing myself to go for what my heart wants and by generating happy energy that others can channel with (yes, yes, this is very concrete!!!)

In total, I have estimated that between my trip expenses, labour and fabric expenses, my trip will cost 13 000$. I have already been able to pay for my ticket and for my stay with my friend Kim See Tai, a local jewelry designer who has been so kind to accept me as a guest roommate. If it wasn't for her, it may have been completely out of my reach to travel to Trinidad. I want to say thank you to my father Michel Tamer who connected me with Kimi's aunt, Pat Ganase. Pat helped me to find Kimi.

I am scheduled to leave on the 25th of june and to come back on the 31st of july. And I want to be able to employ as many seamstresses as I can to reach my 200 dresses goal.

So, I am counting on you, and I am grateful for your support.

To show you a little bit of what it is that I do, here are pictures of the original works that I did which were the seeds of the hope and faith that I now have that I can be successful as a Fashion designer and fashion brand founder and president.










I want to give special thanks to Alain Dahan who generously gave his time, skills and kindness while photographing the models wearing my creations. Special thanks to my make-up artist and model Keywine Tranquille who is self-thaught and for whom this photoshoot was her first experience at working on others. Special thanks also to my models, who were strangers I approached  in the streets or in bars and to whom I asked to volunteer model for me: Coco Cotelette, Sae Fukamizi, Stephanie Catherine, and Nishi Soma. Thank you girls! you have now become very special friends to me.