They're fluffy, soft jumpers with a cheeky message of love and politics. People Snugglers baby jumpers are the featured July pop-up item at Braddon's kids store Tip You're It - and $5-$10 from the sale of every jumper is donated to a migrant or refugee charity. They're the brainchild of Kate Evans, a former Canberra-based journalist.
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Evans worked for a time for the ABC in the capital before moving to Indonesia with her partner and eventually settling in Auckland.
While the jumpers are eye-catching and have a message of love, there's also a slightly political edge to them. The seed of the idea was planted in 2013, when Evans, working for the Australia Network, travelled to a remote island off West Timor to meet a group of shark fishermen who had turned to people smuggling. She found the men were mired in poverty, often poorer than the people they were transporting across the seas, who took on the jobs without fully understanding what they were asked to do.
Later, she was describing the encounter to friends and joked that there should be more "people snugglers" instead. "I'd met these people smugglers and they were just incredibly poor and [the image of people smugglers in Australia] didn't reflect reality. I wanted to play with that idea a bit," she says.
"It's quite tongue in cheek... the point of it is to make people think about people smugglers in a different way and to poke fun of the fear campaign, how easy it is to caricature people smugglers."
Evans decided to design the fluffy jumpers for her friends and spent about 18 months sourcing wool and labour to get them knitted in Indonesia - "if I'd known how difficult it would be I might not have tried it" - all while working full time and moving to New Zealand. Her friends still living in Indonesia modelled the jumpers in 30C heat for her. Then they were featured in Frankie magazine and there was a rush of orders.
And how did the jumpers come to Canberra? Evans had returned to the capital for a visit and was walking down Lonsdale Street with a dozen baby-size People Snuggler jumpers in her bag when she saw Tip You're It. "I I went in and said, 'Um, I've got this weird idea' and the first shop I went into is where they ended up."
Tip You're It currently stocks mostly baby jumpers and a few women's. $10 from every adult size jumper and $5 from the baby jumpers are donated to refugee charities and Evans will send donations from the Canberra sales to a yet to be decided Canberra-based charity.
