Hello everyone! As all good things must come to an end, our blog series named ‘Meet our community partners’ must also come to an end! During the one and a half month that this series of blog posts has run, we have met Ecce Homo’s community partners, that is, all those non-profit LGBTIQ+ organizations around the world that are proud members of our Corporate Social Responsibility program! Having been introduced each week to a non-profit queer organization, we have gotten familiar with the history, the mission, and the projects these five members of our colorful family run. This blog series was part of Ecce Homo’s long-term engagement to promote the visibility of its community allies by taking up the role of media sponsor. In addition, I hope it constituted an opportunity for our customers and friends to be kept informed of the activities of the organizations they choose to support via their purchase, ensuring this way both their active engagement and the non-negotiable transparency of our CSR program.

As you already know, in Ecce Homo, we take pride in doing things quite differently from our competitors. Like every underwear company out there, we design and manufacture clothes with the purpose of providing all our customers with solutions to meet their need for high-quality clothing, and with the means to craft their unique gender and sexual identities. Yet, working in close collaboration with the LGBTIQ+ community itself, the designers of Ecce Homo go to great lengths to imbue our unique designs with our corporate philosophy regarding gender and sexuality. As a result, we hope our undergarments do not reproduce the dominant and mainstream images of what counts as ‘beautiful’ because we have felt on our very own skins how queer fashion hides under the pretense of beauty the over-sexualization and objectification of the queer bodies and gives a free pass to discriminatory behaviors among the members of the queer community on the basis of their gender and sexual identity, age, ethnicity, race, able-bodiedness, and embodiment. This way our clothes and promotional campaigns speak for themselves when it comes to diversity, visibility, and inclusion.

When it comes to our CSR, rather than being a secondary supplement to our profit-driven activity, we aim at creating a long-lasting and substantial commitment to supporting the LGBTIQ+ community all around Europe. And this is an officially written term on our founding Charter! Our CSR enfolds towards two directions that complement each other.

First of all, we are heavily invested in supporting organizations devoted to the advocacy, empowerment, and support of the queer community in major European cities. Not only Ecce Home takes up the role of media sponsor on behalf of these queer organizations by spreading via its social media and blog their message, but also the 5% of the price of each purchase (before VAT) is to be donated by Ecce Homo to one organization of customer’s choosing. Thus, the consumer chooses an organization from a list of ones of different subject matters and across Europe in an attempt to cover as many issues -that the queer community in its diversity faces- as possible. We want to make it perfectly clear that this amount does not fall on our customers in any way, and it is rather withheld from the firm’s income, and that transparency reports are to be published periodically on our website.

Secondly, by providing the human capital of the Ecce Homo’s team members and covering -entirely or partially- the costs, we are to organize ourselves -or in collaboration with queer organizations that stand up for the LGBTIQ+ folks- in-house activities, such as workshops, webinars, street work projects, etc. Such an initiative has already taken place six months ago, the alliance between Ecce Homo and Positive Voice, the Greek Association of People Living with HIV, in the context of which we produced and distributed to the Greek LGBTIQ+ sex workers in need free protective -against Covid-19 virus- facemasks.

Our future plans include the widening of the scope of our CSR program in terms both of the subject matter and of the geographical span. Currently, as we have already expanded to the USA market, we are in talks with USA-based organizations, especially those that support queer people of color! 

Stay tuned to our blog and social media, and particularly to our restless Twitter that has been running for a few months now providing visibility to our community allies and carving out a space for communicating with our friends and customers. This way you will be kept informed of both the ceaseless development of our CSR program and the activities of the organization you chose to support via your purchase.