Make something week – FR Croatia story

 Last year, 2018. was very busy with Fashion Revolution Croatia team, and to be honest very successful considering events. When someone mentions success, it is always a picture of ‘’full football stadium”, of course, it wasn’t like that, but for Rijeka, the small city on the Croatian coast, where we are based, what happened can compare to that. To explain the situation we have to go a bit back to history, to 2016. The first year of organising Fashion Revolution Week, at that time it seemed that trying all of this in Rijeka is a complete failure. It is true that local media gave us thumbs up, we were at the newspapers, also gave an interview to local radio stations, few web portals published our events. But at the end of it- there were no people on the main event – the projection of the ‘The True Cost’ movie. When the time come in 2017 to organise the Fashion Revolution Week, we were a bit skeptical, afraid, and 2016 was always in our mind, what if we face failure again. We have organised projection of a movie again, together with a short debate after it. This time it was better, we have reached a small number of women interested in fashion, mainly woman that have their own brands, friends, and family. Despite that, what is important our live video from the event was overlooked by more than six hundred people. In the end, we didn’t have such bitter taste like a year before. Why we don’t know, maybe because of global events, maybe because people started thinking differently, maybe because of the last 2 events people started contacting us by themselves. Our 200-likes Facebook page started receiving messages of people that want to join the team from different parts of Croatia. We knew we are ready for something bigger, so Fashion Revolution Week 2018 was actually a 2 days event, including lectures, clothes swap, movies projections. And it succeeded. Much better reach, and what is most important ‘’not only family and friends’’, random people with random stories, not only connected to the fashion. This actually gave us energy and strength to be part of a MakeSmthng Week 2018. Still, without knowing what to expect, we have organised our first workshop – Making of Christmas Ornaments out of PVC bags. Miss Tanja Blašković, young artist from Rijeka, who we met on FRW 2018 invented her own way to use plastic bags and to turn them into beautiful items. Still, we were a bit afraid of how we will reach people. So we published the Facebook event, and when we were at the beginning of contacting local media, thinking about printing posters, composing emails to invite people, messages started arriving. The workshop was full only two days after publishing the Facebook event! People were excited to have something like this in our city. With the total of 30 people, miss Tanja held the workshop in a small local bar called ‘’ Cukar I Kafe’,’ and the feedback was excellent. The atmosphere was great, the bar was full, some of the attendants wanted to educate their young ‘ones. A lot of questions were asked, and from what we have seen global thinking was changing. Also, we had enough interest to organise another workshop, two weeks later that was full too. In the end, yes we didn’t fill the football stadium, yes we were tired, still thinking that it is impossible to make changes in Croatia, but something was leading us, and we continued and gathered new strength for the

future. And we think that people really started to change their minds about the way of buying, and about all that is happening in the world. We hope for the even bigger reach this April.