Safe, and still cool enough for school
The Dominion  Post Wellington - March 2007

A Wellington mother and entrepreneur seems to have cracked the age-old schoolyard dilemma of cool versus fool.

Whether it’s such iconic geek gear as the Stackhat bicycle helmet, nomads school shoes or grandma’s knitted mittens, the clash of socially acceptable with sensibly respectable has been the bane of parent’s lives for generations.

Enter Anna Southon. She wanted a rain jacket for daughter Olivia to start school in, but could find only black and navy ones – and neither would make her five-year-old visible in a traffic mad world.

Three years later, parents around the country are sending thank you letters to Mrs Southon’s company GearedNZ for the solution she devised – high visibility jackets that kids want to wear.

“I went for the He-Man cop look, it had to be not geeky,” she said about the self-designed Roadworks raincoats and vests.

Roadworks are in their second season this year. Orders for the three designs are already up by nearly 300 per cent and Mrs Southon has had to take on an Auckland sales manager as well as calling on her mother to handle Christchurch.

Waterproof, windproof and designed to roll tight for school bags, the jackets sport an asymmetric array of reflective tape and fluorescent yellow panels, a name panel on the inside and pack-away hoods.

“It’s a combination of the safety factor, the practical factor for mums, and the cool factor,” Mrs Southon said.

The jackets, marketed directly to schools and on the website, are priced at less than $55.

But keeping them affordable meant that New Zealand manufacturers were out of the question. They quoted up to $90 apiece to make them. Outsourcing to Asia caused a few difficulties but at a quarter of the cost it was the only option, Mrs Southon said.

“All kids deserve to be kept safe so I didn’t want the price to be up there,” she said.

With thank you letters flooding in from parents and children spending their pocket money on a Roadwork’s coat, it seems the mix is just about right.

Market research at school fairs and the like has discovered that fluorescent orange is the new black in the schoolyard, so a redesign with different colours may be in order, she said. ‘I want them to be about safety, not fashion. But we do have an ongoing debate about hot pink.”

Nick Churchouse