gerard mckenzie-govan
is relentlessly disruptive
Gerard McKenzie-Govan is disrupting prejudices one thread at a time through the UK’s first non-profit fashion label aimed at ending homelessness. The Blankfaces’ goal is to shift mindsets by sparking conversations that promote empathy and understanding, qualities that Gerard himself developed during a unique childhood spent helping his mother run a hotel that housed the homeless.
Gerard was actually born on the continent of Africa, where his family temporarily lived for his dad’s work. After some time, his mum had a yearning to return home to Scotland, and so she and Gerard moved to Ayr, where she set up a small hotel. Gerard and his parents stayed in one room, and the others were taken by guests. A friendly woman with an empathetic spirit, Gerard’s mother took in homeless people, who shared the hallways with her family.
“I never saw a them and us. If someone needed dinner, my mum would cook them some food. If someone needed their kids looked after, my mum would babysit them, and the same back, she’d leave me with someone in the hotel.” Gerard spent his formative years sharing his life with people experiencing homelessness, and so he wasn’t conditioned by society to view them as ‘other’. “That was my upbringing, it was like one big family.” Gerard recalls his mother instilling a solid moral code in him from this early age. “She’d tell me to help people as much as I can, and don’t ever think you’re better than anyone.” These morals would go on to define the course of Gerard’s life.
Age 17, Gerard left home to study fashion. As someone who “was always buying the wacky stuff,” clothing and style was a huge passion for him, and so he decided to explore a career in the fashion industry. Whilst studying, he landed a job in the new Diesel shop in Glasgow, and spent the following years working up the ranks from shop floor to visual merchandising. Gerard’s eye for style and knowledge of the industry saw him go from strength to strength in the company.
During his time at Diesel, Gerard’s wife became pregnant with their first child, prompting Gerard to rethink his career now that his family was growing. It was sadly during his wife’s pregnancy that Gerard’s mother passed away. “I wanted to do something in my mum’s honour, but I also needed something that would give me good hours and good pay.” With his wife and new baby front of mind, Gerard stepped away from fashion and took up a position at British telecom as a business manager. Gerard had secured the wages and working schedule he’d been looking for. The trouble was he found it terribly unfulfilling.
When his son, Otis, was born, Gerard’s whole frame of mind changed. “Everything changes when you have kids, you get a whole new mindset.” Becoming a father was also bringing back memories of his mother, and he began to refocus on the beliefs she had taught him as a young boy. “I’ll admit I probably put the blinkers on with homeless people when I was younger. But when you have kids you start seeing things differently.” Gerard’s eyes had been opened once more, and he began to notice more and more homeless people on the streets. Gerard’s moral code was ringing, “I started to wonder, is there something I can do?”
He started volunteering on a weekly basis at the homeless shelter, The Lodging House Mission, in The Barras. From sweeping floors to cooking and cleaning up, Gerard spent his time at the shelter helping out and speaking to the people that came through the doors. “I got chatting to people, and started getting to know them and their stories.” In building these relationships, Gerard was starting to understand the prejudices that homeless people in Scotland were facing every day. “Nowadays there’s so much prejudgement. When people say ‘the homeless problem’ they’re putting the problem on that person and not considering the fact that it’s society and the government who aren’t doing what they should be to support them.”
When Otis was around 3 years old, he began asking his dad questions about the homeless people they would walk past. “He’d ask me why that man was sitting there. I didn’t have the answers.” And he realised that most people walking the streets didn’t either. A lightbulb moment happened for Gerard on a random night out with his wife in the city. “My wife saw someone wearing something and went up to them to say ‘I love what you’re wearing, where did you get it?’ It got a conversation started.” It was then that Gerard realised that clothes had the power to get people talking.
In 2018, he applied for a small grant, set up The Blankfaces as a Community Interest Company and created his first design. Never one to shy from controversy, Gerard’s design was a cheeky take on his city’s famous marketing slogan. “People Make Mistakes” was printed on 100 t-shirts. Every single one sold out within weeks and the profits were shared with grassroots homelessness enterprises. It was time for The Blankfaces’ next design, and this time, Gerard was adamant that he wanted it to be co-created with the homeless people his brand was striving to help.
One day he was speaking with a man at the homeless shelter called Davie. “Davie told me that people viewed him as a bleeding heart asking for a hand out, but all he really wanted was to be viewed and treated as a human being.” The image of a bleeding heart stuck in Gerard’s mind. With Davie’s permission, the ‘Bleedin’ Heart’ design was printed on 100 t-shirts, this time selling out even faster. The Blankfaces was proving to be a success, and Gerard took the brand from strength to strength.
Nowadays, each design is inspired or co-created by people experiencing homelessness. The profits from each sale are shared with the individuals or charities that inspire the design. Some designs include ‘77’, created to shed light on the fact that 77% of LGBTQ+ individuals are homeless because of their sexual orientation and gender expression, ‘A.C.E.S’, designed to promote understanding of the Adverse Childhood Experiences that can lead to homelessness, and ‘Anonymous’, co-created by a man named Gary, who shared his experience of feeling invisible to passersby. Every design is thoughtfully created to foster conversations that build empathy, promote understanding and shift mindsets around homelessness. “The Blankfaces is about stripping away the stigma, stripping away the tag lines and the preconceptions and actually just telling someone’s story.”
The Blankfaces had to overcome its fair share of challenges to get to where it is today, and Gerard became no stranger to adapting his ideas to make things work and meet society’s needs. He took on his first physical shop on Great Western Road in 2020, opening in September with a big buzz. However, with Christmas lockdown just around the corner, Gerard had to pivot in order to meet the requirements to stay open. He shape-shifted The Blankfaces from a clothing store to a homeware shop (with additional stock from a friend’s home department), to a takeaway (selling t-shirts in takeaway pizza boxes) and to a pick up point (providing homeless people with sleeping bags, toiletries and other essentials).
And it wasn’t just business challenges that Gerard faced, he came up against his own personal troubles during the course of building his business. Gerard openly shares that he dealt with a mental breakdown following the passing of a close friend. “I just absolutely lost it. I went on a heavy downward spiral.” It was therapy that turned things around for Gerard and today he is a huge advocate for men’s mental health. It also gave him a renewed sense of purpose that motivated Gerard to want to further his impact. He believes that his mother was guiding him from above.
“We were making good money but I felt I could be doing more to help people experiencing homelessness. I wanted to show her how good we could do.” And so he opened up a food bank in his West End store, asking for donations on social media. “We had pasta up to the ceiling, loads of kids stuff, loads of sanitary everything, it was amazing. I was like this is a community” Gerard felt a calling like he had never experienced before.
As he grew the food bank, Gerard began to realise that it wasn’t just homeless people who were in need. “There were old women, young doctors, people from every walk of life coming in who actually needed help.” These individuals felt ashamed to ask for help, and so Gerard decided to remove the stigma and replace it with dignity. He moved the food bank to the back of the shop, renovated the space and renamed it ‘the tuck shop’. “People could come into a nice boutique shop, pop through the back to get whatever they needed completely for free, and then leave back out a clothing shop with a Blankfaces bag, so there’s no judgement surrounding it.”
Beyond the clothing store and the tuck shop, Gerard has also organised kids winter coat collections, free hot meal stations, sleep pod donations… If there's something Gerard has had the ability to help with, you can bet he’s done it.
Gerard started The Blankfaces with the goal of helping five people each year. Last year he helped 2,273 people. With a new space in The Social Hub in Glasgow and goals to grow the brand further, Gerard has ambitions to keep disrupting stigmas and support even more people experiencing homelessness. Guided by empathy and understanding, Gerard is certainly walking in his mother’s footsteps.
