Construcciones Yamaro: TradeMutt celebrates five years of providing mental health support to tradies

This year marks five years since the launch of TradeMutt, an Australian social impact work wear brand helping provide mental health support to tradies across the nation.

Ed Ross and Daniel Allen founded TradeMutt with a vision of helping make a once invisible issue impossible to ignore – improving and supporting the mental health of tradies. TradeMutt was born in an effort to encourage tradies to talk with each other about how they’re feeling and to provide them with dedicated free early intervention mental health counselling, so they have somewhere to go to continue the conversation.

Today, five years on, TradeMutt has helped fund $700,000 worth of free counselling through TIACS (This is a Conversation Starter), which equates to over 4,000 tradies, truckies, and rural and blue-collar workers gaining access to free mental health counselling.

According to Ross, TradeMutt was created from a concept of focusing on mental health through funky work shirts. The brand delivers high-impact, colourful and bold clothing designed to encourage tradies to talk to each other and show some vulnerability. The clothing is intended to start a conversation and in doing so, help tradies to open up and share how they are feeling.

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Allen said the pair founded TradeMutt and later TIACS when a close friend took his life. “We were so shocked and overwhelmed with sadness when it happened – it made us realise that we needed to do something to stop the unnecessary loss of life,” Allen said. “We had no idea that our friend was feeling this way.”

“Work sites can be busy and noisy, and are not particularly conducive to having conversations, so we thought if we could create clothing that encouraged tradies to open up, this might help them to talk about what is going on in their head.

“We started by creating Funky Shirt Fridays, encouraging tradies to wear their TradeMutt clothing on Fridays, but soon realised everyone loved them so much they just wanted to wear them every day.

“Nationally, we really needed this as suicide among tradies is twice the national average for men.”

TradeMutt donates 50 per cent of its profits directly to TIACS, which is also founded by Ross and Allen. TIACS is a free and confidential chat, text and callback service providing mental health counselling services for tradies, truckies, and rural and blue-collar workers as well as those who care about them. The service is industry funded and is also supported by businesses across the country from a broad range of sectors.

On every shirt it produces today, TradeMutt includes a QR code so that tradies can simply scan their own shirt to pull up the number for TIACS – making it easy for them to call or text the support line when they need to talk with someone.

Ross said it isn’t just tradies that TradeMutt and TIACS are helping. Their services are being utilised by blue collar-workers and labourers across many industries. “Men made up 71 per cent of all callers,” he said. “In 2023, TIACS has experienced 160 per cent growth in demand for its services compared to the same time last year.”

“Tradies are concerned about a broad range of issues but some of the key themes include the impact of building and construction company collapses and relationship issues.

“Tradies face unique issues and value being able to seek help from a support service that understands the challenges they are facing.”

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