Eight years ago, Ed and I were just two chippies on a building site.
I was a bloke trying to make sense of losing a best mate and Ed was a bloke figuring out how to support me through that.
Like so many others, we had to figure it out on the fly.
We didn't have a business plan and we didn’t have an EAP. We had grief, we had each other, and we had a stubborn belief that the silence killing men in our industry wasn't inevitable. That it was a choice. And that maybe, if we made enough noise, we could make a different choice, feel possible.
So we made work shirts. Loud ones. Ones you couldn't ignore.
We had no idea what we were starting.
Eight years on, we think about what has happened in the time since those first 1,500 shirts went out into the world. The conversations that started on jobsites and farms right around the country. The bloke who told us he'd worn a TradeMutt shirt for 18 months before he finally found the words to tell a stranger he wasn't okay, and that the shirt gave him the courage to do it. The Geelong work site where one employee asking to wear his shirt on Fridays turned into a whole crew, then a whole site, openly talking about mental health like it was the most normal thing in the world.
That’s because it is the most normal thing in the world. And that's the whole point. That's exactly what we've been fighting for.
And here's what our community is now telling us, eight years in:
That number blows Ed and I away. But on the outside, I’m not sure if people fully appreciate what that number means.
These are apprentices, tradies, truckies, farmers, blue-collar workers. These are the very people that the world told us would never open up. The people the statistics had written off as too stoic, too proud, too conditioned to harden up and get on with it. Ninety-seven percent of them now say their mental health is a priority.
That's not a survey result. That's a culture changing.
It's the thing that has always mattered most to us, more than the donation figures, more than marketing and PR, more than any accolade. Because funding TIACS is important and we'll never stop doing that. But shifting the way people think about themselves or shifting what a bloke believes his worth is, that's the work that saves lives before a life hits crisis.
Thanks to our epic community of Mutters and their eagerness to contribute to TradeMutts annual impact survey, we’ve now got hard data to back up what we’ve known for a long time.
A conversation in a TradeMutt shirt is so much more than donating to TIACS!
With this community driven data, we're now building our Theory of Change: a framework to map that full journey and show the world what a shirt can actually do. Our Theory of Change is in its final stages before being published so keep your eyes peeled. But honestly, you already know what it does. You've felt it. You've lived it. That's why you're here.
Eight years. We're so proud. We're so grateful. And we're more sure than ever that the most important work is still ahead of us.
If you’ve been with us for a while now, then you’ll already know we always love to drop a birthday collection. This year, to mark the moment, we’re bringing you a footy jersey, a duffle bag, a Steeden rugby league ball. We love this drop because these products are built for the places where real life happens. At social gatherings, a run around down at the park with mates, the backyard on a Sunday or a weekend away with someone special. Take the conversation with you wherever you go.
If this movement means something to you, come celebrate with us.
You'll never walk alone.
Dan & Ed
