Ms Worker is a sustainable workwear dress brand founded in Madrid, Spain, by Olga Camino Sevilla. In 2020 she alone created and launched the brand that she would have liked to wear when she had to get dressed to go to the office in the past.
She realized that it is a fact that many women work every day in environments that have dress codes that although unwritten must be followed, and choosing what to wear each morning becomes quite a challenge. Not only for your “look of the day” election but also for your economy.
Ms Worker helps women to have a timeless capsule wardrobe with fewer and better-quality clothes with the extra value of an eco-design, adding to the saying of less is better.
WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO SPECIALIZE IN SUSTAINABLE FASHION?
More than a decade ago, my purpose was to create my own fashion brand. I prepared myself to face a change in my profession, first, studying all I could about fashion (I still do) and after, working in the fashion industry.
During this journey, delving into different aspects of fashion and practices I saw in the business, I became more conscious, I transformed from a shopaholic mallrat and unconcerned fast fashion buyer to a more demanding consumer, paying attention to natural and organic fibres, a good design, valuing the quality in the confection, in short, I learnt to value all the work behind a garment. So, when I took the step of forming my own brand, I knew there was another way of doing things, Ms Worker had to be conceived from the beginning with sustainable values.
WHAT ARE THE MAIN CHALLENGES YOU FACE?
One of the main challenges I face is production costs, and consequently our prices. We are a small brand, so buying directly from fabric manufacturers is quite difficult, we must be able to offer at least some variety of textures and colours and because we would like to have the most possible transparency of the production chain, we choose intermediaries that have GOTS or TENCEL or GRS certificated fabrics, and this makes it more expensive. Also, our dresses are sewn in Madrid, we know who sews them, and under which labour conditions, and here, salaries for a job well done are much higher than in developing countries.
Summarizing, recycled or organic materials and manufacture in Europe it is not cheap, and we have to be able to communicate it to our customers and this is the second challenge, most people are aware about what they eat, or they are concerned about the environmental problems of the use of plastic, but we are still far from understanding the environmental and social cost of the fast fashion industry. Now sustainability is a trend and it must be very difficult for costumers to distinguish what is real from what is greenwashing, communication is a big challenge we have and that we still do not face well.
The last challenge we are facing is COVID19, we started this adventure in 2020 and the world in which Ms Worker was thought and planned does not exist anymore, a large part of the population works from home and social events have almost disappeared, so till things return to something similar to our past normality, we started to make face masks and now we are developing two home-friendly designs.
WHAT MAKES MS WORKER DIFFERENT?
I was talking about sustainability as one of our brand values, but we hope that in the future this will be the norm. So, I think that a brand must be attractive by itself. Our designs are desirable because they make the women that wear them feel pretty and confident without losing comfort, for example, all our dresses have pockets, a simple but very practical point.
I love when a woman tries on a Ms Worker dress and smiles at herself in front of the mirror, I feel that I have done a good job, when I design a dress I always think about how stylize women bodies. I want to contribute to women standing strong during their day forgetting their insecurities, and not worrying about their appearance, even more, I want them to feel empowered and feminine at the same time.