Jordan Morris has been surfing for years, but he hates the wetsuits available on the market.
So, he decided to make one himself.
He is one of the young entrepreneurs bucking the trend of a decline in manufacturing in Australia, tapping into a market looking for ethical and well-made products.
"[I] just had terrible wetsuits the whole time. They tear to pieces very quickly. Their materials are quite poor," Mr Morris said.
"It starts off really warm, and then a couple of months in, it feels like you're putting like a wet blanket on every time. They don't dry. They're just made to break.
The now 23-year-old had tried university and had had various jobs, including traffic control and fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) stints on mine sites, but until now hadn't quite found his calling — although he knew he wanted to do something creative.
As luck would have it, his family knew a semi-retired industrial machine sewer who had made wetsuits professionally for decades.
"I just asked her over coffee one time, 'Is there any way you might just teach me and see where we go from there?' And Jan said, 'Yep, let's do it'."
Mr Morris spent most of last year at TAFE studying product design, as well as tearing apart old wetsuits to see how they were made and how they could be improved.
"And it sort of took off from there," he said.
"Now we've got a business. And it's fun because it's Dad and my brother, and we've got Jan, who's awesome to work with."
Mr Morris now has a small factory in Perth's southern suburbs.
It operates two to three days a week, stitching wetsuits for clients who visit in person to be measured, placing custom orders for suits in the style and colour of their choosing.
So far, sales are small, and Mr Morris still does the occasional FIFO swing to top up his income.
But he's able to pay the rent and his staff and is optimistic about the future.
"Orders for this week are up to five, which doesn't sound like a lot, but I think it is," Mr Morris said.
Not the cheapest, but distinctive
He plans to go back to TAFE to learn more about pattern making and design because he sees making customised products as the way a local manufacturer can really stand out.
His father, Peter, who is helping him establish the business, and who had the opportunity to wear custom-fitted wetsuits in his career in the military, agrees.
"We want to be able to make it so anyone can come in — any shape or size — and we'll be able to build them a wetsuit," he said.
"There's nowhere else that can do that in the world at the moment."
Appeal to ethical consumers
While he'll never be able to sell the cheapest wetsuits on the market, Mr Morris hopes people will be attracted to a more ethically produced one.
"It's a very different experience to what people are used to with wet suits. It's a lot more in-depth, hands-on," he said.
"[Manufacturing overseas] you can pay people a lot less, something like $1 or $2 a day, to stitch a whole heap of wetsuits, and you can use terrible material that's petroleum-based," he said.
"I think people think it's a little bit of a money-maker as well because you can increase your margins and not have to pay as much.
In the late 1950s and early 60s, manufacturing, protected by high tariff walls, made up almost 30 per cent of Australia's GDP.
By the late 1980s, when the Hawke government began to remove tariffs, manufacturing was the biggest employer in Australia, at 16.5 per cent of the workforce — now it's just 6.4 per cent.
In the decades that followed, the Australian clothing and footwear industry were particularly hard hit.
But more recently, concern about the rise of 'fast fashion' – cheap clothes made overseas by workers on very low wages – has fuelled interest in more ethical products.
Kristin Goodacre founded her Perth-based fashion label five years ago, after a career in costume design and the commercial knitwear industry in New Zealand.
After moving to Perth with her family, she was thoroughly turned off by the fast fashion industry and keen to do something more creative.
"I felt like there was this big space for just getting out there and doing it yourself with social media and this ability to have a connection with your customers directly," she said.
Ms Goodacre now designs and oversees the local manufacturing of her own women's clothing label, doing all the design and development work herself, then selling directly to the public from a shop that also doubles as her design studio.
"I love working with customers so much, " she said.
A balancing act
While it's never going to generate the kind of profit margins of the major chains, she said making fashion in Australia was doable and profitable.
"It's a compromise. I think that if you're really only interested in the bottom line, then you're not going to choose to manufacture in Australia. You can't," she said.
"But I have the opportunity to have more control over how much of a margin we're getting by selling directly to the customer. You don't have that middle market.
Ms Goodacre deals directly with the people who cut and sew her garments.
She said it was very "hands-on and backwards and forwards with the manufacturer".
"I prefer to work with manufacturers who are doing the work themselves so that I know that the person who is actually doing the work is the person that is being paid," Ms Goodacre said.
"They have made a decision about how much things are going to cost instead of just being told by somebody else what they're going to earn [for doing the work].
Ms Goodacre said heightened public awareness of low pay and poor conditions in overseas factories had also led people to seek out more ethically made products.
"People are so interested and aware of that now," she said.
"And, I think, that is a major reason [people buy my clothes]. Hopefully, they like my designs as well. I like to think that's the main reason they buy from me."
For now, she's happy to stay small, selling from her small shop and online.
"I don't want to lose that intimate feeling. I've found something really special here," Ms Goodacre said.
"But, of course, it is a business, and from a financial perspective, you do want to grow because that's the next natural step. So every year it grows.
"Just to be doing something that you've created yourself, and to be building your own business, it's a great feeling."
