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A Q&A With Andrew Summers from Amare Safety
Hi Andrew! Please tell us about yourself.
My name is Andrew Summers. I am a proud father to two wonderful daughters. My working career has spanned a range of areas including working at a business making tools for construction, finance and safety apparel, including Amare Safety where I have spent the last 19 years.
My role at Amare Safety is varied. I started out in purchasing and I now work as the Customer Experience & Business Systems Support Manager. I oversee customer interactions and the technical infrastructure to support this. This includes websites, our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, servers, and other equipment the business uses. I also work on all marketing and branding for the company. It is fun, challenging and a lot all at the same time, but makes every day different, that is for sure.
Outside of work, I find peace in listening to music, playing basketball, and driving cars, both modern and classics. Essentially having other people build them and I get to drive and break them. The fun part.
Can you tell us a bit about Amare Safety?
Established in 1985, Amare Safety is a leading distributor of personal protective equipment (PPE) and safety gear in Australia. We locally manufacture specialist equipment including high-visibility garments, pouches, gaters, and chemical-resistant garments. Most of our customers are government agencies, emergency services, defence, tradies, and businesses from food and transport agencies.
One of the unique things about Amare Safety is that we have in-house value adding teams across the country. These teams create the artwork and do embroidery and printing onto our products. This means that in addition to manufacturing a safety vest, we can also digitise a customer’s logo, prepare digital mock up files to show how it will look when finished, and then embroider or print the logo onto the vest. Our warehouse team then packs the items and sends them to our customers across the country.
What led you to work in the textile, clothing and fashion industry in the first place?
I ended up working in the textiles and clothing by default, is the best way to describe it. After a decent stint in the banking world, it was time for a change. I ended up in the safety industry, and then in the textile, clothing and fashion industry by extension.
Why is it important to your business to manufacture and value add ethically? What are the benefits? What are the challenges?
Like many things these days, responsible and ethical value adding is more important than ever to ensure that everyone is treated fairly and compensated adequately for the work they do. By signing up to Ethical Clothing Australia, this helps promote and support the ethical treatment of workers within the industry.
The benefits of this directly related to the business are that our staff know they are working for an organisation that values its workers. Any organisation that chooses to deal with us also knows that we are committed to the ethical treatment of the workers within our business. This is key especially within an industry where workers by tradition have been exploited in the past.
Amare Safety obtained Ethical Clothing Australia accreditation in 2020. What made you decide to get reaccredited in the first place? What has led the business to continue accreditation?
As the business continues to grow, we have had to look at our footprint and impact on the world around us. We need to keep ensuring that our business and the suppliers we deal with have a positive impact on the environment, and that the ethical treatment of workers and preventing modern slavery are a key focus.
Supporting accreditations like Ethical Clothing Australia is an important part of this. Ethical Clothing Australia ensures our business is compliant with current standards and practises to give our workers and the customers who deal with us confidence we are doing what we say we do.
