Welcome to Bunnings Trade. Not a trade customer? Go to bunnings.com.au
Sign in or sign up
Job list
Sign in to your account
With job lists you can...
Please sign in or create an account to use Job Lists
Bunnings Trade and social enterprise workwear company TradeMutt have announced a three-year partnership to support free mental health counselling service.
The partnership is a major milestone for TradeMutt and TIACS. Both companies were co-founded by tradie carpenters Dan Allen and Ed Ross, and since TIACS launched in 2018 it has provided free counselling to more than 18,500 tradies, truckies, farmers and blue-collar workers - as well as their families. The service TIACS offers is funded, in part, via 50 per cent of the sale of TradeMutt shirts, the funky workwear brand Dan and Ed founded, and the pair has worked with Bunnings Trade on a co-branded shirt and drink bottle available in store. Bunnings Trade will donate 100 per cent of the funds from those items to TIACS.
“It doesn’t get bigger than this,” says Ed about partnering with Bunnings Trade, with Dan adding: “It’s the single biggest thing we’ll ever do." I am blown away that we’re doing this with Bunnings.
But in another sense, I am not surprised, because why not Bunnings? We have worked our butts off and hopefully the right people see that and want to get on board.
The best mates will tell you they are polar opposites. It was 10 years ago, and the pair were thrown together on a building site when Dan made the move from Western Sydney to Brisbane. Ed hails from Longreach in outback Queensland with a level of ‘country’, Dan teases, that is “far above other country people; he’s loud, and like nothing I’d ever experienced.”
Ask Ed about his first impressions of Dan and he gets animated: “A tall, lanky dude who after the first day of working together said, ‘I can’t wait to go home and crack a beer’.” The fast friends were stuck with each other – Dan a carpenter and Ed starting out his apprenticeship in the trade.
When Dan lost one of his closest mates – a diehard Liverpool FC football fan and soon-to-be apprentice tradie – to suicide, it rocked him to his core. Confused and counting on his then-apprentice Ed for support, the pair started leaning into the tradie mental health space. Why was it so hard to start conversations, especially for men on worksites, about how they were feeling?
TradeMutt was born with the aim of demystifying mental health, making it a little bit more light-hearted to start conversations. From the moment they walked into a pub for a schooner wearing two of their first-ever shirt creations, the chatter began. People asked about the shirts and the slogan – the guys were on to something. At its heart, TradeMutt is about getting the idea of social impact and profit for purpose, inspired by a lost mate.
“His legacy lives on through what we do, and that comes from an extremely traumatic place,” Dan says of his late friend. “It’s quite a complex thing for me to process within myself. I want to do the best for his memory and the best for his family. They’ve been through the most traumatic thing they will ever go through. I’ve stood toe-to-toe with his mother, and many other mothers, who have lost their child to suicide, and that look of emptiness in someone’s eyes, to experience that… those families are never going to recover from that.”
TIACS was co-founded in 2018 by Dan and Ed, expanding their touchpoints of the TradeMutt brand to offer a text (more than 120,000 messages have been received since July 1, 2021) and call service that allows free access to mental health counsellors.
It’s a huge enterprise, with more than $3 million worth of free counselling provided for free to date. From a business of two to now being responsible for 35 staff across both organisations, engaging various stakeholders and, of course, providing life-saving counselling services through TIACS to the community – you can see why poking the bear may not be the wisest move anymore.
“In the early days, it was so new and fun,” Dan says. “We’ve got to take this seriously now, and we do. We don’t take risks like we did before. The future of this whole thing is far bigger than us. It was once about the two of us, but now it’s about the entire company, the entire industry.”
Launching the company in their 20s (Ed is now 31, with Dan turning 35 this year) has seen them mature quickly when it comes to business acumen. “Setting up a counselling and telehealth counselling service is a training school,” Dan says. “One of the funny things was updating our insurance for TIACS when it was in its infancy.
The insurance company asked, ‘What are your qualifications?’ and we said, ‘Certificate III carpentry and joinery’” he laughs, explaining that to the insurance company this didn’t sound like the qualifications needed to start up a telehealth service. “But, in trades, you learn great problem-solving skills and this whole journey has been a continuous problem-solving exercise. As long as you’re happy to solve problems and figure it out, you just keep plodding away.”
While Dan and Ed have made it their mission to provide mental health support to the blue-collar community, they are not immune to the challenges of a low headspace.
Being asked to present a TEDx Talk from Brisbane last year was a huge deal for Dan. Behind the scenes, he was going through a break-up and other personal challenges. The TEDx Talk preparation took him weeks for a 15-minute stand-up in front of an audience (and for the record, he was only allowed to swear once, and the profanity was met with raucous laughter). He was spent by the end of it. Here he was spreading the word about mental health, when he was crumbling.
Just because we advocate for mental health, it doesn’t make us immune to the same challenges that everyone else has,” Dan shares. “We’re all dealing with things on a daily basis. There are relationships, financial stress, illnesses in the family, work stress – all of it together can really affect your mental health. I’ve been in really low spots at times throughout this journey. I know what stuff fills my cup and gives me clarity, moments of happiness or relaxation. I love social sport; it gets those demons out.
Photo credit: Laz Smith