The phone call from Rich Howard-Williams from Plowsharing Crafts this past year was a surprise. I had arranged for Carlo Brutus – a Haitian metal artisan who has acted as a coordinator for our orders since 2007 – to demonstrate the art of making the metal wall art for which Haiti is known at Plowsharing’s[…]
Marcela, of Calypso Glass Chile visited us again this year, this time with her son Oscar who started his own business Green Glass Chile, glassware made of recycled bottles, after college. Her first visit was in 2010 when she had an all-day layover in Miami on the way to the Frankfurt Germany gift show. She and[…]
Barkweave cloth — not to be confused with bark cloth made from tree bark — is cotton fabric with an amazing texture that is the basis for the high-quality traditional Sadza batiks from Zimbabwe. If you’ve handled any of the Zimbabwe batiks, you know the texture and thickness and can understand how important the fabric[…]
An ABC News report in April said the average person receives 500 pieces of junk e-mail every year. Well I must be getting the junk email slated for everyone in the world who doesn’t have a computer, tablet, or cell phone because I get about 500 a day. Okay, some of them are a result[…]
Your retail location has been up and running for a while. Sales have been consistent the last few years and you’re pretty happy. But there’s this little voice inside of you that says, “There are a lot of fair trade artisans and farmers out there that need you to sell more, so you can buy[…]
Seasons become an interesting concept when one lives in places without them. Living in Florida means drifting through the months, only knowing that it’s summer when the school zone lights are no longer blinking on my way to work. So I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge that summer has arrived, even in Florida,[…]
Here at Global Crafts, we’re avoidists. We try to take the path of least resistance to keep our blood pressures low. So as we learned about the laws and regulations of importing and distributing products for children, we did what we thought we should do — run. Anything we had with small parts clearly were[…]
My 98-year-old mother, Bea, always told me to never leave the house without wearing earrings. Most mothers would say makeup but the women in our family have always had an affection for earrings. Bea loves Fair Trade earrings, the bigger and brighter, the better. When someone compliments her on her earrings, she proudly says, “These were handmade by women in Chile”[…]
In 2010, we met Arturo Buenrostro when we were traveling through San Miguel de Allende, a colonial town in central Mexico known by many Americans as a great place to retire. Many Fair Trade craftspeople worldwide have artistic skills and choose to make products out of discarded material like paper, tires, tin cans, bottle tops, seat[…]
I have a Fair Trade sensor in my brain. Every time I hear “Fair Trade” my ears perk up and I start looking around – kind of like when my dog hears the doorbell except I don’t generally bark. The radar’s been blipping a lot lately this presidential election season. Who knew that both the[…]