SYDNEY, N.S. — Through one message at a time and one changed attitude at a time, a socially conscious Cape Breton apparel company is hoping to make a difference through one T-shirt at a time.
Powerful.Creative was launched last summer by Whitney Green, Michael Vickers and Robyn Martelly as a response to injustices they had seen happening around the world to people of colour.
A T-shirt in support of the Black Lives Matter movement was created and quickly moved to 300 customers around Canada and the United States.
“We were just affected, just like many others around the world,” said Martelly. “We wanted to be a part of the solution.”
All three founders work full-time jobs and then make the shirts one by one and one design at a time at Green’s Whitney Pier home.
They were able to divert 15 per cent of proceeds from their initial efforts to the Black Lives Matter solitary fund in Halifax and are now actively working to do more to help other groups and organizations.
“The word powerful can mean anything to anybody, but for us, it means impact and resilience and strength, especially in numbers because there are three of us,” said Martelly.
“Our motto is when we work together powerful things can happen and we need to collaborate and work together at home, in the community, creatively and in the workplace and it takes a village. When we work together, powerful things can happen.”
While initial sales focused on a T-shirt that offered support to the Black Lives Matter movement, the powerful collection has branched out to offer support to others.
Powerful woman, powerfully black, powerfully mixed, and powerful ally are among the messages that allow people to support various organizations and issues and 15 per cent of the proceeds will continue to be donated to local charities.
“I think people really get behind things like that when they know proceeds are being donated to community organizations.”
To coincide with African Heritage Month, three separate T-shirts were created with the theme ‘Celebrate African Heritage 365’ so that people can offer support year-round.
Another shirt states: ‘Unite Like Whitney Pier’ and celebrates contributions to the community from Mayann Francis, Campy Crawford, Archbishop Vincent Waterman and many others.
That works well with the provincial theme for African Heritage Month ‘Black History Matters: Listen, Learn, Share and Act’ that calls on all Nova Scotians to make a better society by recognizing the long-standing history and legacy of African Nova Scotians.
"For this year’s theme and poster design, we wanted to highlight key important accomplishments, successes and milestones by African Nova Scotians,” said Russell Grosse, executive director of the Black Cultural Centre, in a press release.
“We also felt it was important to incorporate elements of the Black Lives Matter social movement which has been a significant influence in advocating for racial justice and diversity."
As for Whitney Pier based Powerful.Creative, their most popular item to date continues to be the ‘Enough is Enough Black Lives Matter’ T-shirt, which initially found a market through various social media channels.
“Basically, we spread the message all through social media and you know how that works, people just share it and just like a lot of community residents have moved away to bigger cities and stuff like that. People started sharing it and it took off from there.”
A new website was launched this month — powerfulcreative.ca — and offers more browsing and buying options.
The business is ‘super small’ right now, according to Martelly and they hope to see it grow in the future. For now, though, they are just happy to see the messages on the T-shirts find a greater audience.
While they have already made donations to the Black Lives Matter solidarity fund and Christmas Daddies, further donations will be made on an annual basis to local organizations.
Greg McNeil is a business reporter at the Cape Breton Post.
