People & Culture at Everpress

At the heart of Everpress is a belief in the power of creativity for good. We started with a clear mission - to support grassroots creators while reducing the waste in fashion - and every year we see more potential to give back and do more as we grow.

We’ve learnt a lot along the way, finding better ways to support the community, protect the planet, improve our garments and build a business. We want to share our journey (both the learnings and the mistakes) openly with our community, always. This page shares more about our actions and aspirations for the people and culture of Everpress.

●A constant work in progress

Team

Where were we

When we started out in 2016, we were a team of just a few people working out of a tiny unit off Broadway Market.

Fast forward four years to 2020, and we’d bloomed into a team of 33 people (and upgraded our office too, in the process). Like a lot of scrappy startups, this growth happened organically; hiring ad hoc for roles as the need for them emerged. As a result, by the time we’d become a team of 33, we didn’t have the internal HR department, or the rigorous hiring policies, to match our size.

In the summer of 2020 our community called us out for not doing enough to protect our Black and Brown employees. And it made us reflect on where we had fallen short. We acknowledge this, and we are sorry.

The actions we take speak louder than any words could. This is why we’re focusing our efforts to do everything we can to make sure the same situation couldn’t happen again, and to safeguard the welfare and happiness of every single member on our team.

What we've done

Building a team that’s as representative of wider society as it can be, in which every person feels supported, empowered, and able to be themselves, is work we’re committed to doing. And we made a promise to double down on doing this work the right way. It means tangible initiatives that make hiring as accessible as possible, working to create a supportive internal culture, and constantly monitoring where we’re coming up short so that we can be better.

Everpress team stats 57.7% Female employees Up 1.19% from August 2020, 5% Non Binary employees Up 5% from August 2020, 37.8% Male employees Down 8.35% from August 2020, 67.6% white employees down 8.35% from August 2020, 32.4% BAME employees Up 10% from August 2020

We know that diversity is important throughout any company too, not just at the lowest level. So we’re monitoring our management stats too:

Everpress leadership stats: 57.1% Female up 7% from August 2020, 42.9% Males down from 7.1% from August 2020, 26.7% BAME up 13% from August 2020, 73.3% down 10.9% from August 2020

We’ve also created new roles to make sure this work is happening daily within our team, and to help foster an inclusive workplace culture:

HEAD OF PEOPLEMelanie Connor, JOINED MAY '21

I'M RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING GREAT EXPERIENCES FOR OUR TEAM. THIS STARTS FROM THE RECRUITMENT PROCESS TO HOW WE CREATE A CULTURE THAT IS INVITING AND INCLUSIVE FOR EVERYONE, HOW WE SUPPORT THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR TEAM AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN.

I work with our leaders to develop great teams in which every person feels valued and is contributing to our success.

What we’re doing next

We are taking strategic steps to make sure each application process is as open as possible. This starts with the way that jobs are advertised, and includes promoting all our opportunities through different platforms, to help drive better representation in the applications we receive. We use the data from our Equality Monitoring survey to help us understand where we can increase representation when hiring.

●A constant work in progress

Culture

Where we were

We’ve grown quickly since 2016, and though we were proud of a lively, social workplace culture, we realised that while for some of our team Everpress was a great place to work, this wasn’t necessarily the case for everyone.

Since 2020, we’ve overhauled our company culture. This is twofold: we want to provide as much support for our staff as possible, to ensure the wellbeing of everybody who works at Everpress. This culture prioritises the wellbeing and representation of everyone. From our Black and Brown employees, to those from the LGBTQIA+ community, to those with disabilities.

But we also understand that part of this is giving our team the tools to create an inclusive workplace, and this means education and training.

What we’ve done

We’ve created more support for the team and made learning part of the culture by introducing:

What we’re doing next

Matching Donations

Alongside our activism days initiative, we want to match any donation to any charity made by any of our team through payroll

Look To Others

We know we won’t get better by only looking inward. So we’ll keep researching the most progressive company cultures from around the world, and we’ll hold ourselves to their standards too.

No Jargon

As well as constantly refining our core values and policies through feedback and research, we will make sure all our commitments and standards are kept as jargon-free as possible, so that they are clear and accessible. We know that it’s not just about having policies, it’s about making sure everyone can access and understand them

●A constant work in progress

Giving Back

WHERE WE WERE

We’ve been committed to giving back since we started, which is why we launched 50:50 in 2016. Our annual drive to raise funds and awareness for causes that need it, we ask 50 designers to create 50 T-shirts around one theme, with the profits going to one organisation or charity; past years have seen us work with Amnesty International and Justice4Grenfell.

We’ve seen a lot of charity and fundraiser T-shirts over the past four years, and since the start we’ve also informally matched donations and helped platform fundraisers too. But we realised we needed to make our support more tangible.