In support of mental health awaraness, the Access Service Australia and New Zealand teams adorn ‘conversation starter’ worskhirts every friday, aptly named ‘Funky Friday’.

TradeMutt is a social impact workwear brand, by tradies for tradies. We make funky eye catching work wear designed to start conversations about mental health among the blue collar community, making the invisible impossible to ignore.

A littel background on the conversation:

Ed and Dan met on a building site back in 2014 when they started working for a new builder on the same day. Dan was born and raised in the inner west suburbs of Sydney, and Ed is an authentic country lad hailing from Longreach Queensland. Though they would seem an unlikely duo as Dan had never ventured west of Ipswich and Ed couldn’t really relate to his stories of interestingly diverse multicultural Sydney. They did however, immediately find common ground with their ability to recite, word for word, every scene from their childhood favourite, Dumb and Dumber.

“Our unwavering appreciation for Jim Carrey along with our solid work ethic quickly meant that working long hours was not so hard because no matter what the job at hand involved, we could always make each other laugh. Our mateship was founded on this attitude and has carried us through absolutely everything.”

“Fast forward six years and here we are, two cofounders of a social enterprise. TradeMutt came about in the confusing but reflective period following what happened in 2015. We are an Australian Workwear brand that aims to make tradies and workers of all kinds look and feel great at work, and in doing so, reduce the rate of blue collar suicide in Australia. Our loud and vibrant shirts act as a catalyst to starting the conversation around mental health in men, a topic that has been hard to approach in the past for blokes, mostly due to the attached stigmas and perceived weakness. However, seeing the emptiness in the eyes of a family who have lost a loved one to suicide make it blatantly obvious, that the courage that us blokes pride ourselves on, is the very thing required to address this silent killer. I believe that true happiness can never be appreciated until we have experienced what it feels like to be at the lowest of lows. Mum always said to me and my brothers “the harder the climb the better the view” and it is only now that I can fully appreciate how wise her words were.”