Local designer pledges charitable donation with every face mask sold

When the Covid-19 lockdown was imposed last March a young lady who is into fabric design set about starting to produce designer masks as fashionable accessories and she now has a new collection ready to show.

Poonam Rupani, a young mother in her early thirties, sits across from me at Ocean Village wearing a yellow cotton mask clipped onto a decorative chain. I take a picture. For good luck she has the ‘evil eye logo’ embroidered on it in black and as a fashion accessory it looks great. I take some pictures of the new collection and then we get chatting about it over a coffee.

During lockdown she used her time in a positive way always with a charity in mind. Suicide prevention seemed to be the topic foremost in her mind so she settled for GibSams and she has a pledge.

“Every month I will be giving a donation to GibSams depending on the sales of my masks. My masks retail at around £8 depending on the chain accessory and my pledge is that I will donate a pound for every mask sold.”

She says that as masks have now become such a necessary part of our lives, why not turn that into a positive thing so that one of our main charities can benefit from it. A noble thought indeed.

The new collection is comprehensive and caters for men women and children. She even has a Christmas present idea which is packaged as a family gift of three masks and a fabric sanitizer.

“All my masks are made of pure cotton, they are washable and I always sanitize the fabric before packaging them.”
At the time she told me that she had a reasonable stock of each colour in different sizes and a variety of fashionable chains which clip onto the masks.

“I always thought that it’s much healthier to wear them as fashion accessories instead of having them in handbags or pockets. It’s always better not to lose them or misplace them so the interchangeable chain is quite useful.

The range of pastel fabric colours I have chosen is very wearable and I’m really excited to find out what people will think.”

Poonam Rupani can be contacted via Instagram: @Blingageclothing