As founder and president of School House, an ethical brand of collegiate apparel, Duke alum Rachel Weeks, Trinity ’07, is finally seeing her two passions blend seamlessly.
This Thursday, fashion and feminism will come together at School House’s first-ever runway show at Golden Belt’s Cotton Room.
“I’ve always loved fashion but I felt guilty about it for a long time,” Weeks said.
That is until an internship in Washington, D.C. opened her eyes to the possibilities of responsible manufacturing.
After her enlightening summer, Weeks came back to Duke determined to learn about the challenges of sustainable sourcing in the garment industry.
“I had an idea my senior year to start a trend-driven ethically sourced collegiate brand, so I wanted to go to a developing country with an emerging garment sector,” Weeks said.
Weeks said she saw the need both for a more fashionable collegiate product and also to break the cycle of poverty in the garment industry. She combined the two, and she said the results have been tremendous: a trendy line of clothes a cut above the uniform block-letter t-shirt that’s made by ethically treated workers.
“Her clothes are unbelievably cute, which makes the price more bearable. But it’s also a good, dependable line that supports a cause, which kind of cements the deal,” said senior Cynthia Chen.
After spending a year in Sri Lanka on a Fulbright scholarship, she returned home and started a small living wage garment factory in Sri Lanka with a partner. Now, 12 months after the launch of School House and a highly successful test run at Harvard, she will sell the brand at 85 schools across the country through a deal with Barnes and Noble.
“At the end of the day a lot of problems boil down to poverty, and I really saw an opportunity to essentially triple the wages at these factories,” Weeks said.
Weeks partnered with a labor rights coalition in Sri Lanka that conducted a living wage survey, tripling her workers’ wages so that they would be able to sustain themselves—and she’s not even close to being finished.
“Living wage has been the first step that we’ve taken but it’s by no means the last,” Weeks said.
Weeks said she wants to include English classes and day care facilities for her workers and would also like to get DukeEngage and Duke students involved.
In the end, however, Weeks said she hopes students end up buying clothes from her line simply because they are more style-savvy than typical bookstore offerings.
“It’s very important to me that we’re not selling a charity product,” Weeks said. “I want people to buy the clothes because they like them—and for the fact that we care so much about the means of production to be the icing on the cake.”
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