of how #2, Homie co-founder and creative director Marcus Crook, started a brand without any previous business experience and pioneered an innovative upcycling solution. Inside Retail: Tell me about your life before HoMie. Were you always interested in business and starting a brand?  Marcus Crook: I was always into fashion and had worked casually in retail, but I never had any experience in business or design. I had a strong passion for social issues and had done a lot of volunteering overseas. I met Ellen Jacobsen, who is our head of impact and helped start HoMie, while we were both volunteering in the favelas in Brazil, and I met [HoMie co-founder and former CEO] Nick Pearce on a bike ride in Cambodia to raise money for Child Wise. So I think it was just a passion to do good mixed with a passion for fashion – merging the two to create something that could make a difference in the community.  IR: You were in your 20s when you started HoMie. What was it like launching a brand without having much business experience? MC: It’s that old saying: ignorance is bliss. We didn’t have much experience in the roles that we were doing, but we had a shared passion and commitment to our cause. I think that’s why HoMie has been so supported by the community – because we’ve always stuck to our values. Looking back, we were very naive in our thinking. HoMie was only supposed to be a pop-up store for a month. We didn’t have any grand ambitions to have our own clothing brand. It was purely driven by a commitment to try to break down stigmas and stereotypes surrounding homelessness. There’s no way we ever would have thought that we’d still be around eight years later. It’s been an awesome journey and there has been a lot of learning along the way.  I’m a self-taught photographer and designer, so I had to jump into the deep end and learn all these things about business and people. It’s been a university degree in itself.  IR: What have been some of the key turning points in HoMie’s growth journey over the past eight years? MC: Moving into our store on Brunswick Street in Fitzroy was a pivotal moment. No person with any business sense would have signed that lease in the position that we were in, but we didn’t know better. We had an inkling that it was a great space for us.  Being featured in our first Melbourne Fashion Festival in 2018 was a huge highlight from a brand perspective, and we’ve had some pretty big moments on The Project with Tommy Little. But every year, the best days are the graduation days for the young people [who participate in HoMie’s retail training program]. It just reminds you why you do it and what you set out to do in the first place.  IR: Tell me about launching your upcycled collection, Reborn. How did it start, and how has it evolved? MC: It came from a desire to do things differently. I thought there’s got to be a better way to deal with excess stock than sending it to landfills in Ghana. In 2018, we had some product left over from our VIP Days [where the brand closes its doors to the public and invites young people experiencing homelessness to shop for free HoMie garments]. We thought, how about we cut up these T-shirts and sew them back together? I had a crash course with my mum, who taught me the basics of sewing, and we put them up online just to test out. It was going well, so we started to partner with other brands that had excess stock and dead stock that didn’t get used. But the problem has always been scale.  I had a connection with ABMT Textiles [a Melbourne-based textile manufacturer] and started talking with them about our remake program. There are a lot of problems with Australian manufacturing at the moment, so I thought, how can we combine the two to create an upcycling facility? Brands have so much dead stock, but they can’t exactly ship it off-shore to be remade, and then ship it back because it would cost a fortune.  We’re just finalising our partnership with ABMT at the moment and have done a few sample runs. We’ve got some big collaborations and people wanting to work with us this year, and we’ve set up a system where a percentage of the cost to remake the garments goes back into the HoMie program.