درباره این اپیزود
Sarah Jordan, our guest this week, is the founder and CEO of Y.O.U Underwear, an ethical underwear brand created in 2016. Her mission? ‘Changing the world, one pair of pants at a time’!
While volunteering with the Uganda International Marathon, Sarah discovered that girls were missing up to 25% of their education because they didn’t own a pair of underwear. The realisation that something many of us take for granted ‘has such an impact if you don’t have it’ became the catalyst for her work.
Sarah’s background is in the charity sector, including at Oxfam and the MS Society. Once she began researching how underwear is made, she was confronted with fashion’s toxic supply chains — pesticides, pollution, and widespread exploitation. She refused to ‘solve one problem and create another’, and built Y.O.U Underwear on a different foundation: Fairtrade‑certified organic cotton, SEDEX‑audited factories, and a commitment to paying everyone in the supply chain properly.
Y.O.U. operates a clear buy‑one‑give‑one model, donating each purchased pair through Smalls for All, to vulnerable women and girls in the UK and across Africa. Some collections also support communities in Kenya and Tanzania, and a pink range raises funds for breast cancer charities.
A defining theme in Sarah’s story is her personal and financial commitment. She has bootstrapped the business entirely, working freelance for years and returning to paid work recently. Stock purchase requires up-front spend, with Fairtrade cotton minimums and long lead times. Growth has been slow by design, but steady: Y.O.U Underwear now has a shop in Oxford, a second opening in Brighton in summer 2026, and annual turnover of around £350–370k, with over 10,000 pairs of underwear sold last year.
Sarah’s experience shows that slow fashion is structurally hard — but for her, doing things fairly is ‘the only way she can sleep at night’, and the only way business should be done.
Visit Y.O.U. at: https://www.youunderwear.com/
Connect with Sarah at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahbjordan/
رونوشت 🔗
Ally Dunnett: Welcome Sarah, great to have you here.
Sarah Jordan: Thank you very much, you both. Lovely to be here.
Ned Wells: Sarah it's so nice to see you. and I wonder if we could start with an introduction to you and Y.O.U. Underwear ⁓ the work that you do.
Sarah Jordan: No problem at all. So yeah, as you said, I run Y.O.U. Underwear. We are what I describ…
