We all know the stories of accountants who spend years peacefully grinding through numbers and filing tax reports for entirely unremarkable companies – until one day, apparently out of nowhere, they lose it completely and start attacking unsuspecting trousers with needle and thread.
That is more or less what happened to Tham.
After seven years in accounting, she decided that numbers had received enough of her attention and started making bags, hats and purses from old jeans instead.
It started with her husband's trousers
Like many good stories, this one began more accidentally than strategically.
One day Tham was sorting through her husband's clothes and came across an old, ripped pair of jeans. She had always enjoyed making things, so rather than throwing the denim away she turned it into a bag.
She posted the result online.
Someone promptly asked if they could buy it.
The positive reaction surprised her. More people became interested, more old jeans found their way onto her worktable and, eventually, the little experiment started looking suspiciously like a business.
Her family supported the idea. Friends and acquaintances were somewhat less enthusiastic about the prospect of abandoning a secure accounting job to cut up used trousers for a living.
Luckily, Tham ignored them.
Learning everything the hard way
Quitting accounting did not magically turn her into a textile designer.
At the beginning she had to learn almost everything: drawing patterns, sewing, embroidery, construction and all the small practical decisions that separate an idea from an object somebody can actually use.
For the first years she learned by doing, making mistakes, correcting them and trying again. Over time this resulted in hundreds of different designs – bags, hats, purses, cosmetic pouches and whatever else a particularly interesting piece of denim suggested.
And that is one of the interesting things about working with discarded clothing: the raw material refuses to behave like raw material.
It already has a history.
The jeans get a vote
Before anything can be made, the old jeans have to be collected, washed, dried and sorted. Not every type of denim works for every idea, and no two pairs arrive in quite the same condition.
Then there are all the things already attached to them: pockets, seams, rivets, belt loops, faded areas and occasionally damage that turns out to be more useful than inconvenient.
All of these can become part of the finished piece.
A pocket does not need to be recreated because one is already there. A worn patch may become a visual accent. Different shades of denim can be combined, while small leftovers become material for patchwork details instead of going straight into the bin.
This means the material participates in the design process whether the designer likes it or not.
I rather like that.
One pair of jeans is not another
Industrial production depends on uniform material. Tham's work depends on almost the opposite.
A pile of used jeans contains different colours, thicknesses, textures, cuts and histories. That variety is precisely why two finished pieces are rarely identical.
The challenge is not merely to make something pretty from whatever happens to be available. Tham puts a lot of thought into usability as well: pockets where they make sense, shapes that work in everyday life and constructions sturdy enough to survive being used.
Simple designs may be completed relatively quickly. More complicated pieces can take several days.
That is another thing easily forgotten when looking at a finished handmade object: it may have spent considerably longer being argued with than admired.
A one-woman power team
When I originally wrote about Tham, she was still working largely on her own.
Designer, seamstress, material sorter, product developer, photographer, customer service department and management were all inconveniently concentrated in the same person.
A creative one-woman power team.
What she enjoyed most was not simply finding a use for discarded denim. It was the learning that came with building something of her own: how to design better products, how to organise the work, how to reach customers and how to turn a skill into an independent livelihood.
At the time, one of her plans was to pass some of that knowledge on through workshops and teach other people how to work with discarded textiles.
Tadu
I still like Tham's story because it contains most of the things that make small creative businesses interesting to me.
There was no grand master plan. There was an old pair of trousers, a person who wondered what else they could become, somebody on the internet who wanted the result – and then a sufficiently unreasonable decision to leave a secure job and find out where the idea might lead.
That is how journeys start sometimes.
And apparently, every now and then, accountants really should be allowed near sewing machines.
More of the people and workshops we have worked with can be found in People & Craft.