™ by Me: Our Charity Drops Are Indeed Charitable

™ by Me: Our Charity Drops Are Indeed Charitable

The byMe clothing brand has been making people fall in love with Ukrainian clothing for eight years. They started with a single seamstress and now have a team of 30 people at their production facility in Vyshhorod, a showroom on Khreshchatyk Street, and their own charity foundation to help the Armed Forces and IDPs. The amount of aid the brand provided over the past two years exceeds UAH 20,000,000. People wearing the same byMe clothes hug each other on the streets in Ukraine and abroad without looking away. How did they do that? We have talked about this with the brand’s co-founders, Alina and Dmytro Serdiuk.

We have noted that the ™ by Me brand has recently undergone a transformation. On the one hand, this impression is due to your cultural projects, and on the other, to charity ones. Why did you change your strategy or adapt it?

Indeed, we hear many people saying they feel we’ve changed, but from the inside, to be honest, these are natural steps on the path we have been walking since our establishment. Even before the full-scale invasion, we set out to make people fall in love with Ukrainian culture, back when it was not as widespread as it is now. We also began collaborating with foundations before the invasion, but in my opinion, we didn’t do that systemically enough. Therefore, our assistance focus has now strengthened: We support both the military and civilians in various ways.

How has your cooperation with charitable foundations developed?

Nowadays, charity drops are not something new. Still, we developed our approach to creating them prior the invasion. Back then, we made a capsule of socks with the EverybodyCan foundation, transferring all the funds to them. We believe that a charitable initiative should be truly charitable, so there can be no “percentage of profits” or “percentage of income” that goes to help. For our part, as a brand, we invest our resources in each charitable item. Our customers create added value when they buy this item. Thus, we invest in charity equally with our clients rather than try to cover the cost of the item. As a result, all our charity drops are 100% charitable.

At the time of the invasion, we were preparing the second capsule for EveryoneCan, and we did finish it. Then we thought, why not create our own foundation? We know that charitable foundations can keep up to 20% of their funds for operational activities, but we have never used this possibility. We give away everything we get.

Who is in charge of your foundation? Do you have a separate person or a team for that?

In 2023, the foundation’s team consisted of five people: we, a couple of our friends Daryna and Oleksii, and another friend, volunteer and ATO veteran, Yaroslav. Since we wanted to ensure proper distribution of aid — so that the cars and bulletproof vests would be on the balance sheet — there was a lot of paperwork, which Daryna took on. Oleksii and Yaroslav used their experience and skills to find and deliver the necessary items to the military. Dmytro and I make financial decisions about which items or collections will be used to fill the foundation’s fund. We also give the sales and marketing teams a vision of how to communicate about this. Previously, this was done manually, but now we have developed a strategy for promoting ideas, collections, and involving other companies.

And how does your team perceive such “extra tasks”? Does this engage them?

In late 2024, we presented our business strategy. To implement it, we need empathetic, caring people who share our values and find it natural to help whenever they can. The people working with us now meet these criteria. What’s most interesting is that they attract like-minded people to new vacancies. In other words, it’s more effective to make social media post about a job position than to publish it on some job aggregator. We pay for work on a charitable collection like we do for a non-charitable one, but specialists can additionally feel that they belong to a good cause. They talk about this opportunity themselves and repost our fundraising campaigns without a reminder or any bonuses. When we organized a campaign with letters from displaced children to St. Nicholas, each team member took one or more of these letters to ensure these children received gifts. Everyone then said they were proud to work with a socially responsible brand. Thus, our strategy already takes the team’s contribution into account. Next, we are thinking about how to involve a wider range of people.

What business indicators does your corporate social responsibility affect? What have you noticed?

We always tell our team that while it is important to make money for the business, the latter must also be useful — it should bring something important to the society. So, the first indicator is the team’s involvement and belief in what we do. The second and perhaps the most important one is our clients who keep coming back, willing to fall in love with Ukrainian culture. We get feedback that people choose our items because they share the same values, with the tag uniting them as customers. It’s like when you see someone wearing the same thing as you and feel happy. That’s why our goal is to unite these conscious Ukrainians around us, for this is the foundation of a conscious society. There is one more thing that is hard to quantify with any single metric: the willingness to share our social mission. When production stopped in February 2022, we went to our customers and asked for support through our certificates, and it worked. Additionally, we see an increasing number of customers and a growing interest in charity collections.

Also, tell us, please, how you came to integrate Ukrainian cultural motifs into your collections?

We have always worked with Ukrainian motifs in some way. In 2019, our designer was looking for a floral print idea, which is a fairly traditional story for a spring collection. Her grandmother came up to her table and suggested looking into the Red Book for inspiration. It was an instant decision to depict Ukraine’s rare plants — they are native, beautiful, and in need of protection. In 2020, during the pandemic, we used the image of Hoverla to cheer up those who couldn’t travel. It’s the highest mountain in Ukraine, a symbol of freedom and inspiration — these were our associations at the time. Along with the Hoverla collection, we released a drop with the Tendra lighthouse, because there are no talks about mountains without talks about the sea and vice versa. All of this was an experiment, and we were watching to see if people would respond to this approach of small collections. It turned out that they really liked it, and this became our special way. Now, we plan our collections six months in advance. Moreover, when we first started creating them, most of the items were basic, with only a few being bright and recognizable. Several years have passed, and no By Me™ collection has items that lack meaning. We, Ukrainians, are used to being interested in other cultures, but it’s very important for us as a brand to inspire people to appreciate and protect what we have.

The Red Book is a clear case, but how do you work with more complex topics, like the Berezil Theater?

Today, anyone can find information about anything. But the question is, how do you distinguish the truth from stereotypes, myths, and fakes? This is where our responsibility begins, because to make collections based on Kosiv ceramics, Petrykivka painting, or the like, we conduct special research. It might involve studying books on the topic, going on an expedition, and consulting with museum researchers or other specialists. The fact that we make high-quality things that people want to wear is just the tip of the iceberg. We are also a bridge between researchers developing their studies in a closed academic world and the general public. We help people discover their own heritage.

Have you ever faced hate? Why were you criticized?

We had a collection dedicated to the most basic Ukrainian ornaments. To choose which ones to use, we relied on Olena Pchilka’s book and added her story about the symbolism of ornaments. In the comments, we received criticism from folklore students claiming that symbolism is not scientifically proven. Also, there are two apocryphal stories about Les Kurbas: The one that he and Mykola Kulish were shot with the same bullet, and the other that he took a Ukrainian poplar sapling with him into exile. These are very emotional stories that touch us, conveying the spirit of the Executed Renaissance epoch. However, if we look at the dry facts, there were neither diaries nor surveillance cameras in the camps. All we have are testimonies, legends, and stories from those who survived there. So, we always have to balance facts with interpretation and how people see the former. We would like such collections to spark public discussions, for we believe this can help people find their roots, love their traditions, and overcome learned inferiority. Ukrainian culture is amazing. In the future, Ukraine will be one of the best, strongest, and, in some aspects, most developed countries. But for this to happen, we need to start building it now.

What steps, perhaps not so public ones, are you taking to achieve this?

Last year, we held a team training session to improve our Ukrainian language skills and learn the new spelling rules. At first, we thought it was very awkward to say some words in a different way. But how differently you can view this change when you understand the historical background, when you realize what the Soviet regime did to the Ukrainian language. We have to re-establish these connections with the past in order to move forward — personally, as a company, and as a country.