Age 38
As a business leader, Claire Theaker-Brown has rarely taken the conventional path.
Although Unbelts is inherently an apparel company, Theaker-Brown wasn’t looking to build a fashion empire when she set out in 2011. Instead, her focus was on building community.
“What’s always been really important to me is how connection is formed between people, and how products facilitate those connections,” she says. “It’s not just about apparel. It’s about purpose-based business, or triple bottom-line businesses that operate for people, planet and profit.”
Over the past decade, Theaker-Brown has stayed true to her mission of creating meaningful, mutually beneficial connections between people. Since launching Unbelts, she has grown the company from a part-time, one-woman side project into an operation spanning three countries, backed by a living wage, often woman-run supply chain. She hopes that it’s an example other businesses will follow.
“The conversation that I think is so necessary to have is about where our businesses fall in the broader global context. How are we connected to other economies? And are those relationships mutually supportive? Are they extractive or exploitative? Are they colonialist?”
Yet along the unconventional path she’s taken to growing Unbelts, there have been some conventional successes, like seeing Unbelts worn on the red carpets of both the Oscars and the Junos.
“The funniest thing is — and this reveals what kind of YEG nerd I am — but we appeared on the Oscars red carpet and we were super psyched, sure. But then Mayor Sohi wore us at the Junos and I literally cried, I was so excited,” she laughs.
“I hope that one day I meet him and he’ll just happen to be in an Unbelt.”
She runs a business that embraces ethical fashion
This article appears in the November 2022 issue of Edify
