After first releasing a collection of products under its Freedom Melon label in November 2023, Chicago-based online apparel retailer Wear the Peace has since donated more than $1 million to charity to support civilians in Gaza.
Those donations, driven by tens of thousands of unit sales, went to provide food, water and medical aid in the region.
The Freedom Melon refers to Wear the Peace’s watermelon-based design. The graphic displays a wedge of a watermelon, which shares colors with the Palestinian flag, and came to represent a symbol of support for Palestinians. The design gained wider interest within the first couple of months after its release.
“The thing with the Freedom Melon is it went in the press,” Wear the Peace co-founder Murad Nofal told Digital Commerce 360. “And then [actress] Jennifer Garner’s daughter wore it and she got hounded for it.”
Nofal and co-founder Mustafa Mabruk, who are both Palestinian-Americans, launched the apparel company in November 2016. Nofal told Digital Commerce 360 that he and Mabruk focus on highlighting refugee crises through their brand. Other causes the company has supported include clean water access, sending girls to school in areas impacted by war, and addressing clothing and food shortages. Its efforts since its founding have reached into Jordan, Kenya, Venezuela, Yemen and other countries.
Since November 2023 and as of Oct. 3, 2024, Wear the Peace has donated $1,163,670 to charitable causes in Gaza, according to the company. The company first crossed the $1 million mark in donations in July, the founders wrote in an email to customers. In addition, it has also donated more than 235,000 clothing items through its “buy one, give one” program. Through the program, Wear the Peace donates a new clothing item for every item purchased from the retailer.
Wear the Peace donates profits from its Freedom Melon collection
The Freedom Melon collection includes T-shirts, crewnecks, hoodies, pins, tote bags, hats and jewelry. Wear the Peace is donating a portion of each item’s profits specifically “to provide water, food, evacuations, & medical aid to Gaza,” according to its website. The company donates to a variety of 501(c)3 nonprofit charitable organizations, including:
The organizations are a mix of secular and religiously guided nonprofits that do work in the Palestinian territories, as well as other parts of the world.
In the case of its T-shirts, which sell for about $25 depending on the product, Wear the Peace donates $11 per shirt, Nofal told Digital Commerce 360.
“That’s exactly what the company would have profited, which was awesome,” Nofal said. “Instead of paying toward ad spend, we’re just paying toward donations.”
In the first four-and-a-half months that the collection was live, Wear the Peace sold 19,000 crewnecks, 13,800 hoodies and 12,900 T-shirts, each including the Freedom Melon. That alone drove more than $500,000 in donations from Wear the Peace.
“We’re so glad we made that move to be true to ourselves, especially being Palestinian,” Nofal said. “It would have been pretty weak of us not to take a stance.”
Keeping up with the demand for apparel that goes viral
Nofal told Digital Commerce 360 he was glad sales eventually slowed down. The pace was unsustainable for his company for a few weeks. Still, Wear the Peace sales slowed down to a pace that was already better than the year before, he added.
Wear the Peace is “lucky” its manufacturer is in Chicago — where the apparel brand is also located — and can handle large orders, Nofal said. The problem, he said, was forecasting. Normally, Wear the Peace gives its manufacturer a count of how many products that will need to be produced within the next two or three weeks. At some points, he said, a single day’s sales would take up half the inventory Wear the Peace had forecast. The apparel brand would place orders for more product every three days, he explained.
“They were so annoyed of us,” Nofal said. “Three days and then three days later we’d have another order that would span us out and then another three days. But now it’s more manageable.”
He said he doesn’t know how bigger companies manage it, though he recognizes that they have teams dedicated to supply chain needs.
“It’s good that our manufacturer was here,” he added. “It helped. If we were offshoring our manufacturing, this would have been bad for sure.”
In the meantime, many customers received their orders late, some of them a month after placing their orders, Nofal said. But they were also understanding, he added. In Wear the Peace’s post-purchase communication, it told customers it had already donated on their behalf. Most people were buying for the cause, he said. Because of that, they would “feel less annoyed” when their orders came in late.
Wear the Peace co-founders’ personal connections to Palestinian refugee crisis
Both co-founders are Palestinian-Americans whose families were among Palestinians displaced during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, events that Palestinians refer to as the “Nakba.” Eventually, visiting the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan motivated Nofal to co-found the company as a means to provide relief to them and other refugees.
At first, its customers were mostly Arabs and Muslims, Nofal said. Since 2020, it has accumulated customers from a wider variety of ethnic and religious backgrounds. That was the result of a shirt the retailer released saying “Will Trade Racists for Refugees” growing in popularity, Nofal said.
Then, Israel’s military response to attacks and kidnappings led by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, forced Wear the Peace to consider how it can support victims of the crisis in Gaza. Militants — who kidnapped 251 people, according to the Israeli government, including nationals from Israel, the U.S., Thailand, and other countries — killed about 1,200 Israelis in the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, with more than 5,000 injured, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Since those attacks, the Israeli military response has killed more than 41,600 Palestinians, with more than 96,000 injured, according to OCHA. Experts in the medical journal The Lancet have assessed that due to the difficult nature of data collection in Gaza, the death toll is likely higher.
Business impact of Wear the Peace’s political decision
While Nofal said Wear the Peace initially “lost a lot of customers,” after it decided to launch the Freedom Melon line, it also brought in new buyers as well, making its donations over the past year possible.
Before releasing the Freedom Melon design and collection, Wear the Peace spent about $2,000 a day on ads, Nofal told Digital Commerce 360. Now, it spends a quarter of that.
“We didn’t want to market any of the new pieces because if we advertise them, that’s an extra cost within the piece, and then we’d lose out on donations,” Nofal said. “What people really respected us for was they knew exactly the number amount, like the cash amount of what was being donated.”
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