Cover - Viva Lewes

Names: Abi and Thomas Petit.
Business name: Gossypium – The Cotton Store.
What do you sell? Clothes and other goods made from
Fair Trade cotton.
How long have you been in business? We started
10 years ago. We spent the first two in India finding
farmers and suppliers who shared our ethical and environmental
values, then we moved here to start the
company. At first we had a stall in the Brighton market,
then we got a little shop in Lewes, which was flooded
in 2000. We moved on to the Riverside, and eventually,
six years ago, to our current shop in School Hill, in a
non-floodable zone.
Where do you get your raw materials from? Mainly
the Gujurat in NW India. We’ve done a lot of work
there and it takes five years for a cotton farm to convert
fully to organic, so we’ve stayed loyal to the area.
They have very small holdings – sometimes just an acre
or two, so being part of Fair Trade has helped them
support one another, as well as offering them technical
support and credit when they need it.
Why is it important for people to buy Fair Trade
cotton? It’s crucial – these people can hardly make a
living with their cotton farming and yet they are the
ones who look after the planet for us. Each cotton
plant reduces CO2 as it grows. Our cotton farmers are
proudly part of our supply chain rather than some invisible
toiler in the back. In fact the farmers we use have
become traders of their own product. Actually we have
broken ancient trading patterns when it comes to the
sale of cotton. We have taken Fair Trade cotton out of
the dollar market to which it was tied. The Americans
are going mad.
Anything else? There are also serious environmental
factors: there is no oil involved in the process so you
know that the production of the cotton we use has not
led to any carbon emissions.
Where do your customers come from? We must say
that our local Lewes customers are extremely important
to us. Without them we would never have got the
business going. And they have been very patient when
- as it does with a small company – stock has run out.
Instead of going to shop somewhere else they’ve come
back another day. This has enabled us to expand: we
sell all over the world now, through our catalogues and
internet site. Though we still only have one shop.
You’re not the first ethical clothing business in
Lewes… We came upon Lewes by chance when we
were looking for a base in Brighton, and knew immediately
it was perfect for us. At the same time we realised
that Clothkits was based here. The Kennedys, who
ran that business, have been supportive from the start.
They invested in us immediately and their daughter
Nula does our children’s designs. It’s nice to have such
a link with the past.
Could you do anything to be greener? We’ve completely
stopped using plastic wrapping recently – you
can see the difference on a Thursday night when you
compare our bins with the bags and bags of plastic bags
outside Monsoon and Fat Face.
But people will always pick up on things. We get shouted
at if the door doesn’t get shut immediately after a
customer walks in, because we’re heating the street.
We’ve jumped through a lot of ecological hoops to get
where we are, and just the fact that we make long life
textiles puts us in another league from the rest of the
clothing trade. On the whole we believe we’ve helped
move ethical consumerism a long way.
Is there anything you always get asked? We’re often
asked what ‘Gossypium’ means. It means ‘cotton’ in
Latin. And also we’re asked if there are any other shops
like ours anywhere. The answer is no. V
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Photograph: Alex Leith
Photograph: Katie Moorman