We had already shared it with you, but I Owe You is finally open, so we thought it would be a great opportunity to talk about this once again….
In essence IOU is a new clothing brand with a heavy social component. Their apparel is handmade & based on fabrics handwoven in India (you may think… bah, there’s 23453 fair-trade clothing brands, starting with Oxfam or even M&S!!), the innovative part is that they provide buyers with the ability to trace the production process from finished goods right back to the weaver that hand-wove the fabric. But how?
Each item has a IOU code as well as a QR code that you can track on-line or with a mobile app (yep, they’ve also released an iPhone app and about to release an Android one). With this code you can unlock the story of the person behind your clothes… get to know exactly who wove their fabric and which artisan company assembled it. Not a bad idea right? Hopefully Gap, Zara, H&M will one day do the same…. right?
This way IOU is trying to build a link between buyer and manufacturer, trying to create an e-commerce social network between these two worlds which up to now have always been so distant.
The fabric is made by hand in India, and the actual assembly of the items in Europe and for now they’re already shipping to most Western European countries as well as the U.S. & Canada. The clothes aren’t particularly cheap but they don’t seem overpriced neither. We’ll let you discover more & unveil the processes by visiting their website IOU Project.
You can also become an ambassador (meaning… sell & show the stuff to your friends) or as they call it “Trunk Show Host” and get their clothes for free as well as earn a commission. This is another strategy they’re using to spread the message. They’ve pretty much thought of everything these people!
And behind the project we find Kavita Parmar, Iñigo Puente, Ricky Posner, Iñigo Manso, Alicia Malumbres & Carlos Hidalgo.
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