Fashion – Enter Ltd Smashes TOMs Targets 

Over the last 17-years, social enterprise Fashion-Enter Ltd (FEL) and the team have pivoted to ethical and sustainable trends and one such pivot was to work with Islington Council on their affordable workspace programme and circular fashion economy. 

In 2020 FEL opened the doors to the community designer retail unit; FC Designer Collective, and then neighbouring affordable workspace facility, FC Designer Workspace on Durham Road the following year. After an 18-month restoration of the disused underground car park the launch of the FC Designer Workspace was to critical acclaim, attracting MP’s and press.

As an affordable workspace provider with the FC Designer Workspace, and a social enterprise, FEL needs to ensure that social value is embedded into its business. To keep a thorough record of the company’s social value we use the National TOMs framework. TOMs stands for ‘Themes, Outcomes and Measures’ that guide social enterprises and relates to a framework that was set up in 2019. 

The aim for FEL was to have a £1.1m value of social good via the TOMs within a ten-year program. The aim of TOMs is to provide a minimum reporting standard for measuring social value. This can be applied to all kinds of organisations private and public and is beneficial for several reasons: 

• TOMs provide a consistent approach to measuring and reporting social value
• Allows for continuous improvement
• Provides a robust, transparent and defensible solution for assessing and awarding tenders
• Allows organisations to compare their own performance by sector and industry benchmarks and understand what good looks like
• Reduces the uncertainty surrounding social value measurement for businesses, allowing them to make informed decisions based on robust quantitative assessments and hence embed social value into their corporate strategies

Since opening the FC Designer Workspace, we have used the National TOMs framework on a monthly basis, this not only ensures FEL is adding social value within its business structure, but it provides crucial information to project partners, in FEL’s case with the FC Designer Workspace – Islington Council.

To date FEL and the Workspace initiative has delivered £794,327 of social value in just three years so we are very ahead of our contractual target which is to achieve £1.1m over a ten-year period. This is brilliant news for the team at the FC Designer Workspace and accompanying retail unit the FC Designer Collective and it underlines what FEL is all about – putting people and communities first. 

FEL CEO Jenny Holloway commented: “We just want to thank Islington Council, LEAP and the GLA for having the confidence in FEL to deliver this groundbreaking programme. It was not always an easy programme to deliver on but once the ground rules were set and the programmes delivered, we are now flying! It’s a fantastic initiative and the only programme that I know of in the country.  So much more can be achieved, and we aim to fully deliver on each TOMs! Huge well-done to the team!”

FC Designer Workspace, Studios 1 – 12, 9 Durham Road, London N7 7FB.

FC Designer Collective, 113-115, Fonthill Road, London N4 3HH.