Sewing a brighter future at LIV Village

Arriving at LIV Village in Cottonlands, you are greeted with a colourful, loving factory buzzing with positive energy while the most beautiful products are hand-made with an African flair.

The 750 square metre factory was opened in 2014 by LIV Village co-founder, Joan Smith who came from a clothing industry background and always had the vision to start a clothing manufacturing factory to help sustain the village.

Having gained years of experience in this industry, Colleen Blew came to the factory from Pretoria in November 2015 and is thrilled with how far the ladies have come.

“Our main aim is to uplift people from poverty. I believe poverty is a mindset and while you can give people training and skills development, you will only really make a difference if you can renew the person’s mind and achieve a change of heart to get a change of attitude.

“We care about the people and when you care, it changes people,” said Blew.

So far, the attention was on training to get the ladies skills up to standard for the work in the factory. This year, Blew said they are focusing on making the factory profitable.

“Our vision is to get the factory full, working at capacity with about 100 workers. Last year, we dramatically increased our production.

“We make uniforms for our choir and when they perform overseas, we make special Africa shirts for them to sell at their concerts.

“We also make tracksuits, school and sport uniforms, LIV’s cleaning company’s uniform, the culinary school’s chef’s clothing as well as items for the shop such as aprons, scatter cushions and
recently also the tote bags,” said Blew.

The factory was recently approached by Uzwelo Bags, which has partnered with Expand a Sign to use their waste cut-off material to make durable, fashionable bags and other accessories with the aim to empower local women, while being more ecofriendly.

Blew said they are extremely grateful to be on board with this project.

“We have received four months of the best training and now have three new, unskilled ladies who have been nurtured and trained to work on industrial machines.” The factory supervisor, Dora Mothiba came with Colleen and said she is excited to see the ladies learn new skills like the bag making.

“We now have 21 ladies and two men working and we are learning more and more every day. All I think about is hiring a lot of people to kick poverty away,” said Mothiba.

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