Nine months, many wooly fingers

It all started back in January when I lost a glove and threw the other glove in the dustbin. A few hours later, in the park, I found someone else’s glove on a railing. I picked it up, took it home, picked the other one out of the dustbin, put one and one together and got . . . a pair of sustainable gloves.

 The next day I showed the gloves to the Green Thing team who quickly decided it was a strong anti-waste idea and so began a journey of nine months and many wooly fingers.

There were many things to be figured out and lots more things to be  decided.

We asked ourselves how we could turn odd pairs of old gloves into things that people would want actually to wear. Washing them seemed like a good idea. As did pairing them up with care – always pairing a wooly glove with another wooly glove, a leather glove with another leather glove, but always making sure that their colours and patterns contrasted as much as possible.

 Then we had the idea of putting Green Thing labels on the outside so if anyone cleverly said “dur, you’re wearing odd gloves” you could hold out your hands, show them the ‘green thing left’ and ‘green thing right’ labels and cleverly reply, “dur, it’s a pair.”

Next, what to call them? We tried names like Double Singles and Hand to Hand and Ten Sustainable Fingers. All, in hindsight, absolutely shocking. Then we peeked at the rhyming dictionary, paired Glove and Love, and we were away.

 Then, the packaging. The name ‘Glove Love’ suggested gloves as characters, and it felt like a great idea to package the gloves with tags that could tell the characters’ stories - how they had lost their old glove lovers and how they had found glove love. We tried writing bespoke short stories, quickly realised that literature on tags was going to be a little unsustainable and settled on lost luggage-style tags that included the glove’s name and details of where or what lonely fate they were rescued from.

One important touch – all the tags and labels are locally sourced and recycled. One silly touch – each tag is tied in wool around the glove’s ring finger.

 Next, where to get the Gloves? We decided that once we had launched Glove Love into the world, we would ask people to send in their lost lonely gloves to be paired. All fine, but we needed a big batch of gloves to start with, so James got on the phone to the museums and theatres and operas of London and to the Transport For London lost property office.

My favourite moment of the whole nine months was when James took me to his desk, said ‘look what I’ve got’ and pulled out two huge bags of gloves from London Transport and grinned from ear to ear. By ourselves we had found about a hundred gloves in parks and at bus stops  - suddenly, with these and gloves that also came in from London’s theatres and operas and The Natural History Musuem, we had over a thousand.

 And that’s when the hard work really started. Holly and Cecilia and Jules and Wells began washing, pairing, stitching, tagging, label-writing, printing and enveloping like mad, turning our little office into a labrynth of gloved-up washing lines like some scene from a Terry Gilliam film.

 There was one decision we still hadn’t made - how much to sell them for. £15, like Accessorise? £50, like Armani? Get people to pay anything they wanted? In the end it was pretty simple – our mission is to inspire as many people in as many countries as possible to do the Green Thing – so the price had to be as low as possible to encourage as many people as possible to buy them. We agreed to price them at £5 plus postage, 50p a finger, and give people the option to donate more if they wanted to.

 So that’s the Glove Love story so far. It’s been hard work for all of us and particularly for Holly who has double-handedly devoted her year to making these pairs perfect. But if the launch goes well, and wooly fingers crossed it does, I’ve got a feeling there’s much more work to come.

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