From Sturt Street to global stages: How Ballarat’s Phoebe Trent is rewriting the rules of ethical fashion

Phoebe Trent’s phone buzzed at 6:47am on a Tuesday in April. A customer in London had sent a screenshot: her hand-woven geometric mosaic pattern, the one she’d spent three months perfecting, was being sold on Temu for $12.99. Trent, 34, hadn’t licensed it. She knew exactly who’d stolen it-a factory in Vietnam she’d stopped working with six months earlier.

For most small businesses, that’s the end of the story. You send a cease-and-desist, maybe you get nowhere, you move on. Trent did something different. The owner of Ballarat’s Stitch & Supply Co. on Sturt Street launched a public campaign that forced Temu to pull the listing within 72 hours-and then used the momentum to quadruple her wholesale accounts.

It’s a cautionary tale that resonates especially hard now. The same week Trent reclaimed her design, a federal parliamentary inquiry into online marketplace protections heard evidence that 41% of Australian small businesses have had intellectual property lifted by foreign platforms. Telstra’s nationwide outage on July 9 also knocked offline the payment terminals of 90 businesses on Sturt Street alone. For Ballarat’s 2,400 registered small businesses, resilience isn’t optional-it’s the rent.

Threads of a new model

Trent launched Stitch & Supply Co. from a spare room in her Wendouree townhouse in 2019. She focused on slow-fashion homewares: cushions, throws, wall hangings, all handwoven by women in a cooperative she helped establish in Bắc Ninh province, north of Hanoi. Each piece carries an NFC tag that, when tapped with a phone, plays a 30-second video of the woman who wove it. “I wanted the person in Ballarat to know Mai’s name, not just ‘Made in Vietnam’,” Trent told The Daily Ballarat in a recent interview.

The business grew steadily. By early 2026, Stitch & Supply had 14 staff across two shopfronts-the original on Sturt Street and a February offshoot on Armstrong Street. Revenue hit $1.2 million last financial year, up from $720,000 the year before. But the Temu incident, which exploded on Instagram and TikTok, brought a surge of orders that pushed the production cycle from 6 weeks to 18. Trent hired four more weavers in Vietnam and two seamstresses in Ballarat.

She also filed a formal IP complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) under the new Design Protection Act amendments that took effect on March 1, 2026. The ACCC confirmed to The Daily Ballarat it is still investigating. “The legal route costs $22,000 just for filing fees here,” Trent said. “Most sole traders can’t afford that.”

What comes next

Trent is now raising $350,000 through an equity crowdfunding campaign on Birchal, set to close on August 14. Half will fund a blockchain-based provenance registry she’s co-developing with two software engineers from Federation University’s technology incubator at the Lake Wendouree campus. The registry will let any small textile business timestamp and store pattern files on a public ledger, creating an immutable chain of ownership. “Think of it as a digital deeds office for fabric,” she said.

The money will also pay for a new POS system that runs offline and syncs when the internet returns-a direct response to the Telstra outage. “July 9 cost me $8,700 in lost sales,” Trent said. “The terminals went down at 9:30am and came back at 2:15pm. That’s 53 walk-in customers we couldn’t serve.”

Ballarat’s small business community is watching closely. Councillor Belinda Coates, who chairs the city’s Economic Development Committee, said the council is hosting a free IP workshop at the Ballarat Mining Exchange on August 3, in partnership with IP Australia. “Phoebe’s story shows that visibility can be a double-edged sword,” Coates told The Daily Ballarat. “We need to make sure creators here have the tools to protect what they make.”

For Trent, the next step is simple: keep stitching. Her Armstrong Street shop will host a weaving workshop on August 10 for 20 local makers. The price is $89, which includes a starter loom and an NFC-tagged label to trace any finished piece back to its maker. “I want every person who walks out of that room to know their work is worth protecting,” she said.