Our Social Impact
Equally important as understanding our environmental impact, is the knowledge our how our business impacts people. Thanks to the efforts of many hard working team members along the way, we continue to foster positive relationships with our community both close to home, and further abroad. Understanding our social impact means ensuring transparency and social compliance within our supply chain, providing educational resources for our customers, giving back to our local schools and charities, and nurturing our growing TFS team.
Learn more about our social impacts by clicking the links below.
Our Supply Chain + Transparency
Much of our sustainable decision-making relies on our team having complete transparency over our supply chain. Transparency is the practice of sharing honest and open information about how, where, and by whom a product was made, under an ethos of constant improvement. There is loads of writing and visual content available to further understand transparency and traceability in the fashion and textiles industry, including this excellent article on the Textile Journey website.
We believe sharing transparent information about our supply chain is an important aspect of ethical business practice, and one that allows our customers to know exactly what they are buying and how it was produced. In our retail stores, you'll see information about where a fabric was made and what certifications is holds, whether it was purchased as deadstock or milled directly, listed on the swing tag of each roll.
We have a dedicated HQ team member responsible for managing traceability of our supply chain, communicating with suppliers and collating information. We are relatively small buyers, which means we have limited influence on our suppliers regarding their practices, but the fact that our supply relationships are formed gradually over time and often through existing contacts, gives us trust and confidence in the integrity of our information.
Education + Communication
As leaders in the home sewing and textiles community, we have a responsibility to openly share our sustainability-related goals, actions and progress with all of our stakeholders, including our customers! Annual progress reporting forms part of our current three-year Sustainability Strategy, and these reports will be published here on our website at the end of each financial year. They'll cover what goals we were able to achieve, the challenges we faced and what problem solving methods we took to resolve them. Learn more about our sustainable approach here.
The language of sustainability is complex and evolving, making it tricky to understand and open to misinformation and greenwashing. To help us on our sustainable journey, we've put together a glossary of commonly used fashion-related sustainable terminology and certifications. We hope you'll find it helpful too! Click the link below to open the glossary.
Our team are also here to answer your questions. If you have any sustainability-related queries, general feedback about this information, or you'd like to share your thoughts, feel free to get in touch via community@thefabricstore.co.nz
Our Blog
To supplement open and honest communication on our internal progress, it's increasingly important to our team to ensure we provide a wide range of tools and resources to enable our community to join us in up-skilling and knowledge building. Our social media channels, websites, pattern brand and TFS blog are all extensions of this desire to educate, and are an ongoing exercise in sharing. Our blog features over 250 posts ranging from everything from home sewing pattern reviews to fabric and colour guides, sewing tips and tricks, in-depth Make by TFS (our own pattern brand) sew-alongs, to DIY and scrap busting projects, staff makes and more.
Our Community + Partnerships
Engaging with our local communities is a natural extension of our core values, respect and mindfulness. Over the years we have developed a comprehensive fabric donation scheme to divert all of our fabric off-cuts, scraps and remnants to local schools, kindergartens, community groups and charities, across our retail stores and HQ. In addition to this, we maintain a philanthropic program supporting a variety of local organisations through event sponsorship, fundraising support, direct advertising and project partnerships.
We're proud to maintain long-standing relationships with a wide range of key fashion and design tertiary educational providers across New Zealand and Australia, providing ongoing student discount programs, graduation and award sponsorships.
If you have a community group, charity or educational organisation and you're seeking a textile-focused sponsorship or donation, we'd love to hear from you! Please get in touch with us via our contact form by clicking the link below.
Our Story
At the Fabric Store, we are simply lovers of fabric. We are a destination point for the sewing and creative community, offering a curated range of designer dress fabrics and mill overruns coupled with an exceptional in-store experience and dedicated, passionate service. Our aim is to provide an alternative option within a fast-fashion society where fine craft and high quality fabrics are often undervalued. We are huge supporters of home sewing, crafts and the #MeMade movement, and appreciate the time and care that goes into creating garments by hand. We believe that creative endeavours like home sewing and crafts can also have a profound impact on our well-being.
We're a New Zealand owned and operated business that began in 1995 as Global Fabrics with just a single store! We’ve grown organically into seven retail stores across New Zealand and Australia, as our customers have convinced us to expand. Our New Zealand stores have been embedded in the local sewing and creative community firmly since their inception and are located in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.
We opened our first Australian store in Sydney in 2008, followed by stores in Melbourne and Brisbane, as well as a short period in Adelaide. A personal connection and the local film industry led us to open a store in West Hollywood, LA in 2013 but soaring rental costs and the logistics of shipping across the world meant we sadly had to close that location in 2018. The LA store created a lot of international interest in our unique offering of fabrics – especially in our range of merino jersey, and once again we were convinced to expand into the online world, opening our international Online Store in 2016.
Our pattern brand Make by TFS was established in 2020, and evolved from our desire to encourage as many people as possible to sew their own clothing slowly, a natural extension of our sustainable and ethical business values and our design-driven philosophy.
Our Team + Workplace
Our Head Office and warehouse is located in Auckland, New Zealand and is the base for our distribution, online store and office teams. Our staff across our retail stores and head office are a friendly, knowledgeable and enthusiastic bunch, who have either studied fashion or been self-taught in the industry and we pride ourselves in being able to provide a high level of customer service because of this. Our teams are our most valuable resource, and we work hard to ensure their health, safety and wellbeing is a constant priority.
Many of our team members are avid home sewists themselves, and active participants in our social media channels and blog. We're often on the look out for new talent - if you're interested in joining the TFS team, check out our latest openings on our careers page by clicking the link below!
