Safia Minney

Safia Minney was born in London in 1964 and spent part of her early career in Japan working on environmental campaigning and consumer advocacy, where she grew frustrated at how little ordinary shoppers understood about the working conditions behind cheap, disposable clothing. Mainstream fashion at the time treated fair trade as a niche concern for aid charities, not something that could compete on style with ordinary high street brands.

In 1991 she founded Global Village, later renamed People Tree, initially running the operation from her home with little capital, working directly with small cooperatives and artisan groups in countries including Bangladesh and Kenya who used traditional skills such as hand weaving and natural dyeing. Retailers were often sceptical that fairly traded clothing, typically more expensive to produce properly, could ever be fashionable enough to sell in serious quantities, and Minney spent years persuading designers and buyers otherwise.

People Tree became one of the first clothing companies to earn World Fair Trade Organization certification and pushed the wider industry toward greater transparency about supply chains, working conditions and environmental impact years before such concerns became mainstream in fashion. Minney remained closely involved in the producer cooperatives themselves, visiting workshops regularly rather than treating fair trade as simply a marketing label attached at a distance.

She later wrote several books on ethical fashion and slow fashion and continued campaigning after leaving day-to-day management of People Tree, arguing that consumers had real power to change how clothing was made if they were given honest information about it.