When Laura Thompson and Sarah Sheridan left their roles at the Victorian Aboriginal Health Service, their vision wasn’t to create a fashion brand. It was to build a company that bolstered health promotion and services among the Aboriginal community. 

But what the pair saw as a tool for engagement – using merch to encourage Indigenous participation in local health programs – quickly morphed into something much bigger. 

“We’ve always understood the power of a T-shirt”, Laura, a Gunditjmara woman, explains. 

“At Clothing The Gaps, we use fashion to unite people around a cause and create social change.”

As a certified social enterprise and B-Corp, Melbourne-based Clothing The Gaps sells apparel to fund its education and advocacy work supporting First Nations communities. 

Their name is a deliberate nod to the Australian government’s “Closing the Gap” initiative, which aims to reduce the disparities in life outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Having launched with a different name, Spark Merch, in 2019, Sarah and Laura quickly learned that purpose-led products resonate more deeply when their message is clear. 

“[Australians] could easily link our business and our purpose together.”

Soon after this, the pair changed their brand name from Spark Merch to Clothing The Gap (note Gap, not Gaps) and filed for a trade mark.

A couple of months later, they received a notice of intent to oppose their trade mark application from US retail giant, The Gap.

“If anything, we thought it would be the federal government that might have been a little unhappy with our branding name choice,” says Sarah.

“When we hadn’t heard anything from the Closing the Gap initiative, we figured we were in the clear,” says Laura. “The lesson for us was that just because you’ve filed a trade mark, that doesn’t mean you’ve been given the green light to use it.” 

Founders Laura (left) and Sarah (right) run the Clothing The Gaps flagship store in Brunswick, Melbourne. Image credit: TJ Garvie

Sarah agrees. “Our biggest advice? Google your business name and see what else comes up. You need to understand the full IP process and where your business is at with it.”

It was their Chief Creative Officer at the time, Narungga woman Sianna Catullo, who unknowingly flagged the IP storm that was about to hit.

“I still remember her walking up the steps at our old, tiny, little office in Preston, and she was like, ‘The Gap has started following us on Instagram!’” says Sarah. “I just thought, ‘oh no, this is not good’.”

Then the notice of intent to oppose arrived. For a fledgling social enterprise, this legal threat was daunting. 

“We didn’t have the resources or money to be able to fight back,” says Laura. “We took that first letter we got from IP Australia and just threw it in the drawer, saying, ‘we’ll deal with that another time’.”

The pair began brainstorming back-up names, buying up alternative domains in case they had to rebrand.

“We had trust that our supporters would follow us to whatever that new name was going to be.”

But then came another, even more unexpected blow.

In June 2019, a cease and desist letter arrived from WAM Clothing — a non-Indigenous company that held exclusive licensing rights to reproduce the Aboriginal flag on clothing.

This marked the birth of Clothing The Gap’s Free the Flag campaign, launched to challenge copyright restrictions and ensure Aboriginal people have equal rights and unrestricted access to their own flag.

Over the next two years, Free The Flag was backed by Australia’s biggest sporting codes, advocacy organisations and some major politicians, with the corresponding petition garnering over 160,000 signatures of support.

While Clothing The Gap made national headlines with Free the Flag, they were also quietly fighting The Gap’s opposition behind the scenes.

“When the Free the Flag campaign took off, we had IP lawyers contacting us from all over the country offering to work pro bono”, says Laura. “Sarah and I were like, ‘where were they with The Gap case?’” 

The pair were clear when choosing representation: a firm could take the Free The Flag case only if they worked The Gap case pro bono, too.

The firm they chose was FAL Lawyers, led by partner Peter Francis, whose work became instrumental in both battles. “We were in the trenches together,” says Laura.

“When you take on the Free The Flag case, you’re working on behalf of the Aboriginal community.”

Battling not one, but two IP cases as relatively new founders was, as Sarah recalls, unnerving.

“Whilst it was incredibly unsettling to not really know what we were going to be called, we had trust that our supporters would follow us to whatever that new name was going to be,” she says.

In January 2021, Clothing The Gap finalised negotiations with The Gap. The business agreed to add an ‘s’ to their name to become Clothing The Gaps – a small change that meant rebranding everything from email signatures to signage.

Still barred from producing the Aboriginal flag’s image directly, Sarah and Laura had to get creative and began experimenting with design.

They played with colour, rearranged flag-like shapes and even employed outlines of the flag in minimal form to become [-o-]. 

Whether on the street or in-store, Clothing The Gaps understands the power of fashion towards activism. Image credit: TJ Garvie

“Our lawyers explained that the 5 percent or 10 percent change rule isn’t necessarily true,” says Laura, referring to the common misconception that making slight changes to someone’s creative work means you’re in the clear.

She and Sarah learned that, when it comes to deciding if a product infringes copyright, perception matters: “If people look at the artwork or design and it reminds them of the Aboriginal flag, that’s the key.”

Their internal conversations turned philosophical.

“If we take out the colours, is it still the flag?” Laura asks. “The colours are the meaning: black represents the people, red, the land and yellow, the sun. If you remove that, is it still the flag, or something else?”

The legal lines were blurry. But in their eyes, finding space to keep their message alive – without breaching copyright – was a form of quiet resistance.

“I want that history to always be remembered.”

Their continued lobbying to free the flag led to a Senate inquiry and, in January 2022, the federal government announced it had secured the copyright to the Aboriginal flag, making it available for public use.

“It was strange timing,” says Laura. “January 25th, just before Australia Day and at this point, we were also campaigning ‘Not a Date to Celebrate’ around January 26.

“Having said that, it felt like a weight had been lifted off of our shoulders. We’d achieved what we wanted to achieve.”

While Sarah and Laura’s work is grounded in inclusivity and shared purpose, they recognise that maintaining IP rights is sometimes necessary. 

“How would we feel if a non-Indigenous company started making ‘Shades of Deadly’ t-shirts? What course of action would we have? This gives us some protection.”

But for Clothing The Gaps, their primary reason for securing their IP is not to shield, but to serve as a storytelling tool.

“Sometimes it’s not as much about protecting it and owning it, and more about the truth and the origin story being cemented. I want that history to always be remembered.”

Hero Image Credit: Maria Palacios