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The designers behind a pair of ethically sourced jeans worn by the Duchess of Sussex during her Australian visit last year have had to double their staff to meet global demand.
James and Erica Bartle founded the Outland Denim company at Mount Tamborine in 2011 and train and employ young women in Cambodia who have been rescued from human traffickers.
"When we started we had five seamstresses who came in and learnt the craft of jean making," Ms Bartle told ABC Radio Brisbane's Rebecca Levingston.
"Now, we have over 100 people working in the Cambodian operations, including management.
"That has doubled since October and it's extraordinary what this level of exposure has been able to do for us and the opportunities it's been able to create for these young women."
Ms Bartle said the publicity around Meghan Markle's outfits had opened doors and "pressed the fast-forward button" on the business.
"Despite the exposure, our team has also done a lot of hard work over the past eight years to get to this point," she said.
"It's a very involved business and the non-government and government partnerships take a lot work."
Finding out royalty has worn your jeans
The royal connection came through friend of a friend who introduced the Duchess to the jeans — she was said to be quite taken with the backstory of the jeans as it resonated with her humanitarian values.
Ms Bartle said she had an inkling that the Duchess had a pair of the jeans in her wardrobe when she came to Australia but had no idea if she would wear them.
"She had just fallen pregnant and the chances of her wearing skinny jeans was slim to none, but there was hope," Ms Bartle said.
"We actually found out like the rest of the world did on Instagram and then we had it confirmed.
"There was a process we had to go through to ensure they were Outland denim before we could broadcast the message to the world."
The phone then ran hot with media requests and people wanting to buy the jeans, she said.
"People are obsessed with having exactly what Meghan has and the jeans walked out the door.
"Our website traffic increased 3,000 per cent and the order spike lasted for at least two to three weeks.
"It's hard to put a figure on it, but we had hundreds of jeans going through our Australian website and we had to reorder an inventory of that particular jean."
Due to the nature of Bartles' profit-for-purpose business model, they could not simply hire another 1,000 people to meet demand; instead they had to be strategic in the way they expanded to handle the level of interest.
"We give the women the training, and jean making is a highly specialised art and it takes them two years to learn how to make a full jean," Ms Bartle said.
"There's 25 parts to each jean and we couldn't overwhelm our little group of seamstresses, so we took new women on over the past few months to get them up to speed."
Why jeans?
Ms Bartle said when planning their business, she and her husband wanted to produce something that people would continue to use and not just throw away.
"We didn't want to make a t-shirt that would be thrown away, we wanted something that had value and that they would wear time and time again.
"We wanted it to occur in the wearer's wardrobe to remind them about the purpose behind them and that they could share the story behind them and the problem we were trying to solve."
She said she hoped to maintain a relationship with the Duchess of Sussex in the long term through friends but hoped that other brands also received acknowledgment in the future.
"There are so many brands doing wonderful things in the world and I think we've had our time in the sun.
"We want to see more people wearing ethical clothing, but we're not going to exploit the relationship; that would go against the fabric of what we stand for."
Topics: fashion, ethical-investment, design, lifestyle, royal-and-imperial-matters, brisbane-4000, mount-tamborine-4272