howies®

The spring 2009 catalogue was about footprints the following is taken from the introduction:

Paul is a surfer. That’s his thing. His love. 

When there’s a good swell, the Print shop prints a lot less T-shirts. Not a great business model. Unless the business model is about how we make the business work for our people every bit as much as how our people work for the business. 

Don’t get me wrong; sometimes it’s a pain. 

Over time Paul had got a surf team together, but it would always be the bike team and skate teams that would go off on tour. Leaving the surf team behind which wasn’t so swell. 

So when I said we wanted to visit factories for this footprints catalogue, Paul suggested we visit our Portugal factory. By pure coincidence (or so he says), the surf is good over there. 

So they set off to visit our factory over there. And, if they got lucky, they would get some surf in too. They got lucky. And while they were off in the sunshine, David Hicks was looking at our footprints, unfortunately for him, not in the sand. 

Some of the information we started to get back, we didn’t like. It was uncomfortable to hear. The truth is like that sometimes. It doesn’t take into account your good intentions. It told us that unless you can measure things, you can’t improve on them. The first three letters of the word assumptions tells you what they can make of you. 

That said, here’s to a company that is trying to make things in a lower impact way. And here’s to a company that understands it has a good ten years of hard work to get there. 

And, finally, here’s to a company that prints less T-shirts when the swell is good. 

David Hieatt 

Co-founder of howies 

Look to the right and you’ll see all the footprint rants, click on whatever you feel like reading.