Gammin Threads didn’t start with a strategy.
It started with two statements:

Respect the Blak Matriarchy.
Respect Blak Women.

Back in 2018, I was coming out of a two year creative block after my mum passed away and leaving a soul destroying job in the fashion industry that had completely knocked my confidence and sense of worth.

I had been working at Djirra for two years, and the NAIDOC theme that year was “Because of Her, We Can.”

That theme stayed with me.

For years I had wanted to start my own brand, because what I wanted to see and create just didn’t exist. But it wasn’t until around my birthday in May 2018 that something shifted and I finally felt inspired to create again.

I wanted to design something that showed my love and admiration for the Blak women in our communities who do so much, often with very little support.

I didn’t want to make an obvious NAIDOC tee. I wanted something that felt like a fashion brand — something cool, timeless, and something that made you connect the dots.

Inspired by streetwear brands like Section 35, Melody Ehsani and Lazy Oaf, this was my way of imagining what a Blak feminist-led streetwear brand could look like.

So Gammin Threads was born from those two statements.

They weren’t about trends.
They weren’t about sales.
They were about making respect visible.

Because violence against women stems from disrespect.

And the horrific rates of violence against Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander women are tied to the violent invasion of this country and the racist systems and harm that followed.

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander women are 45x more likely to experience family violence than other women, and more than 10x more likely to have police use force against them. Already this year, five Aboriginal women have been killed by men.

On this International Women’s Day, I’m thinking about where this all began.

Gammin started with respect.
And that will never change.