Category: search

#whomademyclothes? Fazlul Ashraf?

A week ago PhD student Thomas Dekeyser tweeted a photograph of a note found in someone’s Zara jeans. We circulated it at work, and loads of people discussed what language it might be written in and what it could say. We’d found a note on a CD player and found help to translate it before.

There’s a genre of shop-dropping in which factory workers leave notes for consumers in the things they make. Sometimes they’re genuine. Sometimes they’re hoaxes. Sometimes they’re part of activist campaigns. See our post The 13 best examples of shop-dropping … ever for more. 

This one was particularly relevant for the Fashion Revolution movement, whose core question is ‘Who made my clothes?’ This note could simply be a direct answer. According to Reddit. Or is there more to it?

Thanks to Thomas and to Brad Garrett for the tipoff.
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The travels of the container ship Cosco Pacific

This is the ship that brought our shopping bags from China (where they were made) to the UK (where we are located, and from where we send them to you!) in 2011.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia. Click for original source.

As part of our mission series on Mission:Explore (where you can earn a ‘champion shopper’ badge), we’re asking people to check where it is on this ship tracking website.

The idea is that ‘shoppers’ do this over a period of weeks or months and send us the location (if you want to do this now, just paste its latitude and longitude into a comment on this post). We then pin – with a followthethings.com ladybird – each spotting on the map below and add your name as the spotter. Ian has started this off with a ladybird that shows the ship leaving the southern end of the Suez Canal.

Together, we can map it’s travels. What route does it use to get from here to there and back? Please check back…

Update:

You will notice that we have added an extra icon to the map: a ghostly sunken ladybird. These mark the locations of some container ships that have caught fire or sunk during the course of this followthethings.com project. Click these icons, see the wrecks and find out more about the dangers of container shipping.

Our searchmap under construction: test drivers please!

As part of our ‘classroom project’ we’re creating a searchmap for our website which will appear on it’s new classroom page.

This will allow followthethings.com shoppers to see where the stories on our site’s pages are located. It’s organised via department (the blue cars are pages from the ‘Auto Department, etc.). You will probably have to click the link to the larger map to make the most of this feature!

This map is currently ‘under construction’. It’s being put together by summer interns Nancy Scotford and Tommy Sadler. If you think you might search our site this way one day, please test drive it for us now and let us know your thoughts in a comment on this post. We’re keen to get this right.

Thanks!