AS a teenager, whenever Samantha Hardman was having a hard day, she would buy a fashion magazine on the way home from school. Flipping through the glossy pages, admiring the gorgeous fashions somehow made everything better. “My grandmother was an amazing seamstress and would give me magazines that she’d kept from the 1960s,” Hardman says.
“My mum always said that there wasn’t anything in my life that a couple of fashion magazines couldn’t cure.”
Fast forward to Hardman at 28 and the teen with a passion for fashion was now head of marketing for the digital division at a major bank. But, despite her success, she felt something was missing. It seemed like fashion would once again become her oasis.
‘‘As a kid you may want to be an astronaut or fashion designer, and you just get it drummed into you that it’s not a proper job,” she says. “I’d been in marketing for 10 years and I thought, ‘What am I shooting for now?’ Fashion was still something I held close to my heart – I decided it was time.”
In 2010 Hardman launched her label Bento, a brand that celebrates timeless pieces designed to last far longer than just one season. The inspiration for the eco-friendly label emerged from Hardman’s own wardrobe, where she noticed that she would always return to a few investment pieces that transcended trends.
In an industry of fast fashion built to last only one season, Hardman wanted to perfect the essentials in an environmentally and ethically viable way. “Fast fashion isn’t sustainable economically or environmentally,” she says. “People like to think that child labour doesn’t really exist, that there aren’t people in the cotton picking industry in India with awful working conditions. I liked to assume that surely people couldn’t treat each other like that, but working in the industry has made it very clear that they do.”
Part of Bento’s philosophy is keeping a tight-knit, local supply chain. From her Seddon studio to workshops in Port Melbourne and Brunswick, production is conducted within a 20-kilometre radius. However, despite support from fellow designers and positive feedback from customers, Hardman says she has struggled to convince stockists of her ethos.
“It’s not hard to convince customers; the second they touch the clothes they want five,” she says, laughing. “[But] stockists just didn’t know what to do with the information … Labels have to be genuinely desirable. There’s only so many purchases you can expect from that charity factor.”
Now on to her fourth collection and having made her debut at this year’s L’Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, Bento has come leaps and bounds for a label only two years old. Part of Hardman’s success comes from engaging her customers on Twitter and her regular blog. So what’s next?
“I hope to go into other markets like menswear,” she says. “The whole Bento idea is about being great at one thing. I don’t need 80 dresses – I could just do a good job with one.”
Details: thisisbento.com.
