WUNRN
World Pulse Magazine
Selling beautiful crafts to support the artisans who create them
makes everyone feel good. But are these businesses truly sustainable?
"You need to be able
to return an order, but when you’re working with war widows, you can’t do that from a heart and soul perspective."
Shauna Alexander Mohr | Former global jewelry business entrepreneur
One
day, halfway into a trip to Uganda, Colorado psychologist Torkin Wakefield took
an afternoon walk with her daughter and a family friend. They stopped to talk
with a local woman who was sitting by the road crafting necklaces. The woman
told them that to support herself she crushed rocks by hand in a quarry nearby
for a dollar a day; in her spare time, she and her friends made necklaces by
rolling brightly colored paper—trash that they’d recovered—into beads and
stringing the beads into necklaces. “Why aren’t you selling these?” Wakefield asked,
after convincing the woman to let her buy a handful. “There’s no market for
them,” the woman answered.
Back
in the
In 2004 Bead for Life was born. Their
ambitious goal: help Ugandan beadmakers support themselves within the local
economy. Their plan: hire a Uganda-based team to train the artisans in quality
control (making higher quality beads at a faster pace); buy the beads from the
artisans and sell them to a viable US market; use the net profits from the
sales to train each artisan in a business that would be sustainable (like a dry
goods store, a taxi service, or a restaurant); and then help the artisan launch
that enterprise—all within 27 months.
Though none of the organization’s founders
had a business background, Bead for Life has made impressive strides toward its
poverty eradication mission in the five years it’s been in operation. Not only
has the program graduated hundreds of beaders who have gone on to earn regular
incomes in various economic sectors, they have also provided elementary,
secondary, and vocational training for impoverished youth, assisted beaders in
building over 100 affordable housing units, and started a grants program that
is providing financial backing to other organizations working to end poverty.
While Bead for Life has been more
successful than some of its cohorts, it is just one of many organizations that
has tapped into a retail narrative that is playing out across America, in small
private boutiques, in major retailers like Whole Foods and New Seasons, and
online. The idea is simple: Buy beautiful, “exotic” crafts—baskets from
It’s commerce with a conscience in a market
that is increasingly focused on not only eco-friendly, but also
people-friendly, business practices and products. With its roots in the fair
trade movement—which is fundamentally a strategy for creating ethical economic
opportunities for communities that have been exploited by conventional trading
systems—it seems this brand of empowerment commerce is a simple win-win
enterprise for both the artisans who make the products and the entrepreneurs
who buy and sell them.
But the reality is less clear. World Pulse
talked to eight businesses who confirmed that there are many challenges within
the sector that make it difficult to grow their businesses, and all agreed that
one of the biggest issues is its ultimate sustainability. “Artisans get paid
upfront, whether the product sells or not,” explains Liz Wald, a former crafts
importer who is now the director of international business development at Etsy,
an online marketplace of handmade items. “But if you don’t do it in a way where
you can have a profitable business, you’re not really helping people in the
long run. I was self-funded and ultimately, I left the industry. I realized I
could continue to do this as my personal charity, but who’s going to pay my
rent?”
“There aren’t that many people who are
really trying to save the world with every purchase,” says Wald. “So you have
to have a tremendously good product that’s fairly priced first, and then do a
good job of telling your story.” None of this is as easy to do as you may
think, which probably explains why there is a wide array of business models in
the industry, but still no definitive answer as to which, if any, of these
businesses will create a model that will bea long-term help to artisans, as
well as a profitable enterprise that will outlast its founder’s personal commitment
to its success.
Some artisan handicraft sellers are
not-for-profit, others are for-profit; some sell one product, others sell
hundreds of different items. Most of the businesses that World Pulse
interviewed don’t have the resources to set up offices on the ground in
different areas around the world, so they partner with established
nongovernmental organization s (NGOs) that act as the middlemen between the
artisans and the businesses. The entrepreneurs regularly travel to the
artisans’ countries to visit some or all of the producers they employ.
Within this setup, general logistics prove
to be a challenge to businesses. Yes, the world is growing ever smaller, thanks
to technology, but language differences, and the fact that most of these
businesses are getting crafts from women in hard-to-reach areas saddled with
political instability and violence, means that communication is often a
problem. And then there are the myriad cultural considerations. Questions that
might be no-brainers from a business perspective—like whether you can return a
shipment of orange bowls if you’ve ordered blue—take on a completely different
meaning when those bowls are made by producers who are as emotionally tied to
their work as they are financially dependent on it. “You need to be able to
return an order if you’re working with suppliers and buyers who want to be able
to return it,” says Shauna Alexander Mohr, former owner of a popular jewelry
business that sourced materials from women’s cooperatives internationally. “But
when you’re working with war widows, you can’t do that, from a heart and soul
perspective.”
There are also different concepts of speed
and consistency between the artisans and the buyers, notes Beth Kapsch,
co-founder of Global Sistergoods, another online marketplace for handmade
items. “Many of the groups we’re working with have typically been selling their
products at market, and there’s great variation between what they consider the
‘same’ product,” she explains. “We’ve had situations where we’ve had 1,000
bracelets come in, but they would actually be 100 different things that were
sort of bracelet-like, and in different colors, so then we’d have to divide
them up into ten different products. Upon occasion our artisan partners are
like, ‘Why would you want them all to be exactly the same?’ Which makes
sense—they’re artists!” To overcome this issue, some of the buyers hire their
NGO partners to offer quality and consistency trainings, and others work with
organizations like Aid to Artisans, who make it their mission to help artisans
meet this challenge.
Growing too quickly can take down a company
with even the best of intentions, as Amber Chand says happened with her first
foray into the world of empowerment commerce. Eziba, the company she co-founded
in 1998, launched with $40 million in venture capital funds, and eventually
collapsed—a turn of events that, she says, “absolutely stunned” her. One of the
reasons that Eziba failed, Chand believes, was “the pressure to grow the company
very quickly. The venture capital money needed huge returns, and we made
marketing mistakes. It couldn’t find a way to sustain itself.” Now with her
Amber Chand Collection that specializes in gifts from women artisans from areas
that have been the center of conflict, she insists, “My vision is to start
small and let the artisans know I’ll be working with them for years. My model
is one of slow, steady, sustainable growth, giving women the opportunity to
rebuild their lives. With big amounts of money you get intoxicated. Eziba was a
good company, but the traditional model of business still harbors principles
that I don’t think are ultimately viable.” . . .
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