A Beautiful Mess

A student of fashion and business economics, and having fled Iraq as a young child with her family, Naz founded A Beautiful Mess to solve two challenges she witnessed in Dutch society. Rapidly rising clothing production and consumption have created a global culture of waste, and currently, less than 1% of used clothing is recycled back into clothes. There is also an undersupported and underused labour resource in the form of refugees, who face various social, economic, and cultural challenges in integrating into the workforce.

A Beautiful Mess operates a 100% circular textile factory in the Netherlands, simultaneously creating jobs for refugees with a background in tailoring, and in turn minimising the substantial negative environmental impacts of the fashion industry. The social enterprise has worked with companies ranging from Tommy Hilfiger to Google, to produce fashion collections that recycle waste textiles and 'dead stock', and provide gainful employment to refugees struggling to break into Netherland's labour market.

Since 2019, the organisation has worked on 40 different collections with funding partners, turning over 8,000 metres of textile waste into 15,200 high-quality products whilst giving regular employment to 15 refugees in the 'Restart Programme'. An additional 25 refugees have received training to help them contribute to and profit from the labour market. The organisational structure is set to evolve in the coming months, shifting more to a B2C model whereby the factory produces collections sold directly through stores in the Netherlands and Belgium, and more to be opened elsewhere. A Beautiful Mess will be rebranded as Twenty Fifty, a name chosen to reflect its commitment to sustainability goals. It will launch its own fashion brand producing unisex collections from fully biodegradable regenerated cotton and recycled fabrics.

Aligned with this work and reacting to the pandemic, Naz co-founded "Mondmaskerfabriek", a social enterprise running a surgical mask factory in the Netherlands. Employed by the Dutch Government, the organisation produced a staggering 48 million masks, continuing to produce 1-2 million masks every week. Crucially, it employed 52 refugee workers via the Restart Programme throughout the challenging pandemic period.

‘’As an Ambassador, I gained a huge network of young like-minded people from every corner in the world doing amazing social impact work with whom I can share my experiences and exchange knowledge. From attending the London Summit in 2019 to speaking at the CogX Conference, being able to share this journey and grow together is a privilege.”