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IT TAKES A VILLAGE

Charitable venture turns third-world artisans’ crafts into cash

By Kerri Linden

The insatiable inventory demands of retail chains make them singularly unsuitable for handmade crafts, some might assume. But there is one chain that sells nothing but goods made by hand. Ten Thousand Villages is that chain, a charitable venture founded by the Akron, Pa.-based Mennonite Central Committee to support artisans in third-world countries by selling their wares in the U.S. and Canada.

It all began with Edna Ruth Byler, a Mennonite volunteer from Pennsylvania. The Mennonites, a religious group committed to nonresistance and pacifism, engage in disaster relief around the world through the Mennonite Central Committee. On a trip to Puerto Rico in 1946, Byler was so impressed with Mennonite efforts to teach sewing to impoverished local women that she returned home with goods the women had sewn to distribute to friends and neighbors.

Today this legacy of artisan-created work has blossomed into a global organization with a place in the modern retail world. The first store opened in Bluffton, Ohio, in 1972 under the name SELFHELP: Crafts of the World. The company separated from the Mennonite Church in 1985 and became a self-administered nonprofit, then took on the Ten Thousand Villages moniker in 1996.

In the U.S. Ten Thousand Villages operates 20 company-owned stores, 56 contract stores that buy 85 percent of their merchandise from Ten Thousand Villages, and 390 other retailers that buy smaller amounts of the merchandise to sell in their stores. A separate Ten Thousand Villages organization serves the Canadian market through 40 stores in that country. Last year U.S. sales topped $20 million on merchandise from 35 countries throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

The chain’s 650-square-foot Summit, N.J., store has items stuffed in every nook and cranny: finely beaded jewelry from India; Kenyan musical instruments as well as wood elephants carved from Jacaranda trees; bamboo furniture manufactured in Vietnam and embroidered wall hangings from Indonesia; handmade writing paper decorated with pressed flowers from artisans in Thailand. But though “handmade” might read “very expensive” in the minds of some, the majority of items in the Ten Thousand Villages stores go for $100 or less, including the furniture.

Home decor forms a large part of the merchandise, but jewelry and scarves tend to be the items most in demand, says store manager Marti Petersen. Every product has a story and a village behind it, she says. Take Kartick Pall’s clay vase, for example. Pall, a potter from Bangladesh, has written his life story in Bengali script around the outside of the vase, which has attracted a lot of attention. “People have brought in the ads that featured this vase and asked how they could get it,” Petersen said.

Average household income for the store’s clientele exceeds $100,000 a year, says Petersen. They are drawn to Ten Thousand Villages for its affordable products that are unavailable at other stores. “It’s one-stop gift shopping,” she said. “And it’s affordable. People can come in and purchase 20 of one item and can be done with Christmas shopping.”

The chain’s unusual product and mission also appeal to landlords, who are ever eager to distinguish their centers from the next. “[Ten Thousand Villages] has been here for 10 years … and they continue to grow and do very well,” said Christine Hanington, general manager of the Princeton (N.J.) Shopping Center, a 230,000-square-foot, 50-store, open-air shopping center anchored by a McCaffrey’s Market and an Eckerd drugstore. “They’re truly one of our specialty stores that allows us to draw regionally,” she said. “The concept is great, and customers really seem to like the affordability.”

Most retailers seek the best deals possible from their suppliers, but Ten Thousand Villages, as a nonprofit, says it wants the best deals possible for those who make and supply its products. It follows international fair trade practices that govern wages, working conditions and gender and environmental issues. “Fair trade is a novelty now,” said Colleen Owens, a Ten Thousand Villages Marketing Fellow, who is part of a program co-sponsored by Duke University that brings students into the merchandising and marketing departments of Ten Thousand Villages for hands-on experience. “But Ten Thousand Villages views the relationships as first and foremost. It’s who it was from the beginning.”

Ten Thousand Villages works with artisan cooperatives — groups comprising families or artisans sharing a common trade who band together to produce a product. Artisans in cooperatives linked to Ten Thousand Villages are in relationships that in some cases extend back to the 1950s. Depending on the needs of the cooperative, Ten Thousand Villages can supply up to 50 percent of the retail price to the group before the product ships to cover labor and materials if funds are not available to them, or the artisans receive 100 percent upon shipment.

Ten Thousand Villages draws its artisans from the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed, many of them with physical or mental disabilities or diagnosed with HIV. These cooperatives help artisans provide for their families, and in some cases for their villages. “We improve lives and communities, and the groups and individuals find it very meaningful when they can not only help themselves but get to a point where they can help others,” said Owens. “A workshop owner, for example, instead of just working for him or herself, can think about training people to open their own workshops.”

Ten Thousand Villages’ merchandisers travel far and wide to visit their craftsmen and, often working through translators, help develop new product designs. The company works as much as 18 months ahead to plan what will be on the shelves, advising the artisans with regard to colors and trends, with both sides making suggestions.

The artisans rely on the company as a full-time job. It is not spare-time hobby craft that the company picks up from these far-flung locations, but contributions from full-time employees who rely on this support. “Most of the artisans depend on this work,” said Owens. “It is the bread and butter of their lives.”

Illies Mouhmoud, a silversmith from Terhazer, Niger, recently visited the U.S. to see store locations and demonstrate his skills, making one stop at the Summit store. “Our work is very important to us, as it is what enables us to live, to help each other and to meet the needs of our family,” Mouhmoud said. His demonstration drew a crowd, Petersen says. “He just lit up when he saw the children at his demonstration,” said Petersen. “Ten Thousand Villages helps artisans in an incredible way. His people were once nomadic, and he now has settled down into a home to raise his family.”

Ten Thousand Villages is not alone in its philanthropic retail mission. World of Good, another gift store; and Fair Indigo, a clothing retailer, both of which pledge to guard the interests of their developing-world vendors, have opened in the past year. World of Good operates in nearly 1,000 outside retailers, and Fair Indigo recently opened its first flagship store, in Hilldale Mall, in Madison, Wisconsin.

For its part, Ten Thousand Villages posted some $20 million in sales for the fiscal year ended March 31, up about 25 percent from the previous year. The company Web site, launched in August 2005, has boosted the company’s fortunes too, with 2.5 percent of sales stemming from online shopping in a six-month period last year.

The company plans to expand significantly and double sales over the next three years by opening stores, strengthening existing ones, expanding merchandise categories and heightening its marketing efforts. The chain plans to open about half a dozen U.S. stores this fiscal year.