Carry Somers

Somers organised roundtable debates at the House of Commons and the House of Lords on ethics, sustainability and transparency in the fashion supply chain including Ethical Fashion 2020:a New Vision for Transparency in June 2015 and Fashion Question Time annually from 2015 to 2018 in UK Parliament and in 2019 at the V&A. . Somers speaks nationally and internationally about transparency, human rights and environmental issues in the fashion supply chain.

Somers appears regularly on television and radio in the UK and overseas . She is a frequent guest on BBC World Business News and in November 2018 she appeared on BBC Breakfast to talk about the impact of fast fashion on the environment following the Environmental Audit Committee's inquiry into sustainability in the fashion industry Press articles and interviews include: Forbes How Two Entrepreneurs Became Unexpected Activists And Started A Fashion Revolution Telegraph She Wears It well El País Vogue and Newsweek How the Rana Plaza Disaster Changed Fashion Forever

Fashion Revolution works all year round to highlight the need for greater transparency in fashion supply chains as a means to creating a more socially and environmentally responsible industry. In 2017 Fashion Revolution collaborated with Microfinance Opportunities on the Garment Worker Diaries project, the largest ever survey of garment workers, interviewing 540 people in India, Bangladesh and Cambodia over a year. Fashion Revolution has collaborated with organisations around the world, including Greenpeace for the first Make Something Week in December 2017 IndustriALL Global Union with the British Council for the 2018 Fashion Revolutionaries partnership and UN India at Lakmé Fashion Week. Somers works on research for the Fashion Transparency Index every year, ranking the world's largest fashion brands on how much they publicly disclose about their policies, procedures, practices and social and environmental impact. There are now Fashion Revolution teams in over 100 countries around the world.

Somers wrote the introduction to "Fixing Fashion" which looks at the impacts of consumer culture's addiction to disposable fashion, published in 2015 by New Society. She is co-author of the book Working Ethically, which aims to help business owners find an ethical strategy which will benefit their suppliers, community and environment. She contributed a chapter to the book, published in 2014, Sustainable Luxury and Social Entrepreneurship

Somers is founder of Fashion Revolution, a global movement which arose from the Rana Plaza garment factory disaster in Bangladesh on 24 April 2013. Fashion Revolution is now recognised as the world's largest fashion activism movement, campaigning for systemic reform of the fashion industry with a focus on the need for greater supply chain transparency. Fashion Revolution Day takes place globally on 24 April each year and in 2016 grew into Fashion Revolution Week. In 2017, 2 million people engaged with Fashion Revolution Week, with 3.25 million people engaging in 2018 and 1000 events around the world. In 2019, 1800 events took place in 60 countries.

At London Fashion Week in September 2013, People Tree Ltd. and Pachacuti were the first brands globally to launch the WFTO Fair Trade Guarantee System label.

Somers piloted the European Union Geo Fair Trade project from 2009–12 which traced products from the straw to the Panama hat weavers. 60 social, economic, geolocalisation and environmental indicators tracked annual changes. The pilot project mapped the GPS co-ordinates of Pachacuti's 154 weavers' houses in Ecuador, the parcels of land where the Carludovica Palmata grows, and the co-ordinates of the associations who harvest and process the straw.

Somers founded fair trade hat brand Pachacuti in 1992. Pachacuti was the first company to be certified under the World Fair Trade Organization Sustainable Fair Trade Management System, the first International certification of a fair trade, sustainable production process. The WFTO certification "guaranteed practices, procedures and processes that demonstrate social, economic and environmental responsibility throughout the supply chain". Pachacuti's products were labelled Certified Fair Trade by WFTO UK0001-2009 to 2012.

Carry Somers (born 1966) is a British fashion designer, social entrepreneur and fashion campaigner. She is founder of Fashion Revolution and founder and director of Pachacuti.

Somers was born in Seaton, Devon in 1966 and attended Colyton Grammar School. She has a degree in Languages and European Studies from Westminster College, Oxford, and a master's in Native American Studies from the University of Essex which presented her with the alumnus of the year award in 2009. Somers set up fairtrade fashion brand Pachacuti in 1992 and founded Fashion Revolution in 2013, now the world's largest fashion movement.