With the Australian Fashion Industry Awards fast approaching, Ragtrader is taking a daily look inside each category — the finalists, the work behind the entries and the strategy that earned them their place.
The final category: Positive Impact Award, identifying the brands and retailers driving social impacts across the country. The seven finalists are Akubra, Bonds, Cotton On, Decjuba, Elk, PVH Brands Australia and The Social Outfit.
Winners will be revealed at the AFIA Awards Lunch on Thursday 6 August at The Promenade Docklands, Melbourne. Tickets are on sale now.
The AFIAs 2026 are supported by Headline Sponsor The Retail Score, Gold Sponsors Better Packaging and ReStore, Silver Sponsors Apparel21 and Williams Logistics and Bronze Sponsor Afterpay.
Here's the work that got the finalists there in alphabetical order:
Akubra
Akubra's community commitment is anchored in Kempsey, New South Wales, where its workshop and manufacturing operations have been based for more than 50 years — a long-term investment in a regional community facing the familiar challenges of limited local funding and the ongoing need for stable employment.
The brand gives back through sponsorships, charitable donations and partnerships with local organisations including the Kempsey Show, the Kempsey Cup, the Kempsey Cannonballs, the Macleay Valley Mustangs, Macleay Motoclub and the Kempsey Table Tennis Club, alongside support for agricultural shows and community fundraisers. Just as significantly, the decision to keep manufacturing in Kempsey preserves increasingly rare traditional hat-making skills through local job opportunities.
The outcomes are concrete: 125 local jobs supported through the workshop's operations, 51 years of continuous manufacturing in Kempsey and six community partnerships maintained annually. Sponsorships and donations have helped local organisations fund equipment, events and programs. Akubra's sustained presence contributes to the regional economy through long-term employment and skills development — reinforcing the value of local manufacturing, community connection and Australian heritage for future generations.
Bonds
In remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities there are often no libraries or bookstores, and access to culturally relevant books is extremely limited — directly affecting children's literacy and future opportunities. In 2026 Bonds launched a two-year partnership with the Indigenous Literacy Foundation to help champion the voices that have shaped Australia's story for over 65,000 years.
The partnership is deliberately designed around ILF's community-led model rather than a campaign burst. Its centrepiece is a storytelling initiative co-developed with a remote Indigenous community, ensuring Elders, families and young people lead the creation of stories in the languages and formats that matter locally. Rather than imposing brand narratives, Bonds uses its owned channels, retail presence and marketing weight to amplify ILF's three core programs — Book Supply, Book Buzz and Community Publishing — and drive participation in Indigenous Literacy Day.
The strategic power lies in Bonds' ubiquity. As a brand present in millions of Australian homes — the average household owns 12 Bonds items — it can move First Nations storytelling out of the margins and into the everyday, strengthening pride and language maintenance for First Nations children. It also builds familiarity and cultural literacy among non-Indigenous audiences through repeated exposure. The partnership is embedded in Bonds' Reconciliation Action Plan as a long-term platform, not a gesture.
Cotton On
The Cotton On Foundation, established in 2007, works toward a world where every young person can thrive — focusing on education, environment, mental health, First Nations partnerships and disaster relief. In FY25 the Foundation raised a record $20.2 million, contributing to more than $200 million raised since inception. The engine is the customer: 100% of proceeds from selected everyday items go to Foundation initiatives, a Foundation product is sold in store every three seconds and one in four customers contributes.
In education, the Foundation has built and supported 25 schools across Uganda, Thailand and South Africa, with 14,500 students enrolling annually, 5,887 graduating each year and 500 teachers supported — backed by wraparound services including meals, clean water, healthcare and scholarships.
The Foundation ranks among the top ten givers globally working to improve funding for mental health. Partners include Lady Gaga's Born This Way Foundation, LifeChanger and Strong Brother Strong Sister — through which 400 First Nations young people have accessed a culturally safe space. Environmental work has delivered one million trees planted globally to date, 240,000 in the past year alone, plus reef regeneration through MARRS Reef Stars and nearly 30,000 reef images collected. Team engagement runs deep, with 60 team members recently visiting projects in Uganda and Thailand.
Decjuba
The Decjuba Foundation was established in 2021 by Decjuba owner and chair Tania Austin on the belief that everyone deserves amazing — and set itself an audacious, measurable goal: positively impact 25 million lives by 2025. In September 2025, it got there.
The Foundation operates across five pillars — Empowerment, Experience, Education, Essentials and Emergency Relief — funded by 1% of every Decjuba sale. Employees volunteer through initiatives like the Foodbank Mobile Supermarket Bus, helping provide more than 200,000 meals, and the Good Friday Appeal.
To date the Foundation has contributed more than $15 million across 36 charity partners. Its flagship long-term investment is a $3.6 million multi-year partnership with Smiling Mind, helping scale a school program already delivered in 20% of Australian primary schools to build preventative mental fitness for children and educators. The Foundation has also broadened access to arts and culture as a leading funder of the NGV's acquisition of Yayoi Kusama's Narcissus Garden and a supporter of the NGV Triennial 2026. Beyond the dollars, its partnership model gives charities the certainty to plan strategically — demonstrating that commercial success and social responsibility can reinforce one another at scale.
Elk
Just before Christmas 2025, the Federal Government announced plans to open approximately 2.5 million hectares of the Southern Ocean to offshore gas exploration under the Otway Basin acreage release — with the public consultation period falling almost entirely over the holidays. Elk's existing match-giving partnership with Surfrider Foundation Australia became part of the urgent Save the Southern Seas campaign, supporting a community-led response to a proposal threatening ecologically significant waters off Victoria and Tasmania.
Elk moved fast and practically. Interactive Givee donation devices were installed across nine retail stores for 12 weeks, playing campaign videos and enabling direct customer donations. The brand promoted Surfrider's letter-writing submission tool across its social platforms, created accessible educational content on seismic blasting, developed resources for retail teams and supported fundraising events in Thornbury and Torquay. Then came the paddle out on Wadawurrung Country, attended by 1,500 people, where the team assisted with set-up and promotion.
The match-giving initiative contributed $3,294 between December 2025 and March 2026 with further months pending, and social content generated almost 50,000 views beyond traditional environmental audiences. Founder Marnie Goding funded volunteer safety vests and facilitated uniforms for Surfrider's parliamentary delegation. As Surfrider Australia's CEO put it, Elk didn't just help fund the response — they showed up.
PVH Brands Australia
Fashion careers are too often reduced to designer or influencer, while students from low socio-economic backgrounds face limited exposure to the professional networks and workplace environments that open industry doors. Fit for Fashion — a four-year partnership between the PVH Foundation and the Australian Business and Community Network, running since 2022 and ongoing — was built to close that gap through mentoring, workplace exposure, interview preparation and scholarships.
The program meets students where the industry actually hires. My Career Rules workshops connect students with PVH mentors and showroom tours, while Interview 2 Impress delivers practical coaching timed ahead of Christmas casual recruitment. The Tech Careers Expo shows Year 9 students how digital and data skills power modern retail, and three-year Accelerate Scholarships provide sustained mentoring and financial support — with 2025's expanded cohort of five scholars including a First Nations student and a neurodivergent student.
Across 2022 to 2025 the program delivered 40 programs reaching 748 students with 221 PVH mentors participating. Student awareness of fashion career pathways increased by an average of 52 percentage points to 96%, interview confidence rose 50 points to 93% and 83% of participants said they were at least 50% likely to pursue a fashion career. PVH has directly funded 14 Accelerate scholars — building a repeatable model for fashion sector participation in student pathways.
The Social Outfit
Refugee and migrant women are overrepresented in fashion production yet largely absent from the creative and decision-making roles that shape what fashion looks like. The Social Outfit's Community Print program responds directly, creating a genuine pathway for these women's cultural representation to enter the fashion market — not symbolic inclusion, but real product on real shelves.
The 2025 program brought 12 women together at the Chester Hill Community Hub in Sydney for creative workshops using mixed media, collage and storytelling, deliberately designed for participants with no artistic background. Their ginkgo leaf artworks became the Spring 2025 collection Diya and Nour — professionally translated into silk satin prints and handcrafted by migrant and refugee women in The Social Outfit's own manufacturing studio. An end-to-end journey from community workshop to retail garment.
Across 2025, 21 refugee and migrant women were represented in textile design and production, 86 events were attended and 49 stories told by community members, generating combined reach of 7.7 million. The program's visibility peaked when Governor-General Sam Mostyn wore a custom gown in the community-designed Nour fabric to greet King Frederik and Queen Mary, with the social post drawing over 515,000 views. Participant Aisha went on to found her own social enterprise, Bloom N Loom — proof of impact that ripples well beyond the workshops.