Last year, Lawrence Cowan wore a pink kilt for a month and raked in over £2,000 for the breast cancer charity. This year, his son is joining him in hopes of raising funds and awareness
Me and my son Fergus are turning heads and raising awareness by wearing matching pink kilts everywhere we go for a whole month.
We’re doing this for the charity Breast Cancer Now, where I work as policy and campaigns manager, in hopes of fundraising for cutting-edge research that will help beat breast cancer. I want to remind people that the disease is still killing people every year – 1,000 women a year die in Scotland because of it. Breast Cancer Now’s goal is to stop women dying of the disease by 2050, and I see this as me doing my part to help them reach it.
This isn’t my first time wearing the kilt. The idea came to me last year because I wanted to do something simple yet effective to raise money and a Tough Mudder just isn’t for me! A jokey chat in the office lead to the idea of wearing a pink kilt for 31 days to draw attention to the cause. It took a bit of a brass neck to get the ball rolling – I walked into the shop of Edinburgh-based Howie Nicholsby, who is known for making kilts for celebrities around the globe, and he agreed to design my kilt for me.
My idea took off thanks to the power of social media. I got over 4,000 engagements through my Twitter account, that’s someone engaging with it every 12 minutes throughout the month. At the end of the 31 days I had managed to raise over £2,000, double my initial target, and generated lots of press coverage. There was support from big names such as Tom Kitchin, Gordon Brown, Nicola Sturgeon, and St Johnston Football Club.
The internet played a big part in my kilt’s success, but it also brought a lot of attention out in the real world – I turned lots of heads with tourists on the Royal Mile. It was great to have people stop to compliment me on my kilt, as it gives me the opportunity to talk to them about why I’m wearing it and the importance of the charity, as well as hopefully encouraging them to donate.
This year my kilt is back but I’m taking things further – my 10-month-old son Fergus has a tiny pink kilt to match mine. He’s getting lots of attention and it’s great to see him in it. It’ll be fantastic if he can say when he’s older that he managed to raise thousands of pounds for cancer research when he wasn’t even a year old. He might be the youngest fundraiser in Scotland!
Our month in pink began this week and was off to a great start as over half a million people saw the launch pictures in the paper. I want to spread awareness and raise as much money as possible, so if I’m successful in reaching my target of £1,000 again this year I’ll definitely be bringing the kilt back next year. I’ll just have to think of a way to step it up a level again!
