With Love From Vietnam

Hello Friends of Fair Trade!

When we talk about Fair Trade, we can include a variety of facets. First and foremost, Fair Trade means a fair price for the artisan, but Fair Trade also encompasses nine other principles recognized by the World Fair Trade Organization.

The 10th principle on that list is Respect of the Environment, and Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts exemplifies this by supplying recycled coiled magazine products. Mai Vietnamese Handicrafts was founded in 1991 as a program to assist Vietnamese street children who could not pay for school tuition and lacked the necessary legal papers. Since schooling in Vietnam is now offered for free, Mai has expanded its focus to marginalized ethnic minorities and disadvantaged women in rural regions. Mai works with several craft production companies by providing marketing and design assistance, and 90 percent of the 1,669 artisans working for Mai are women. Some of the proceeds from the sales of handicrafts still go to the program for children.

The small business that makes the coiled magazine products, GAP Co. Ltd. based in Ho Chi Minh City, was founded and began working with Mai in 2006. The popularity of these products has allowed this small business to expand from 15 employees to 20 workers coiling paper in the workshop and 40 workers folding paper from their home. The paper comes from excess printings, purchased from a publishing house, that would otherwise be thrown away. Artisans use traditional basket-making techniques to create super fun, contemporary, eco-friendly coiled magazine bowls. Check out these new, smaller “World News” bowls:

You can also enjoy some of Mai’s other amazing products — like this Silk Market Jacquard Pillow, which was recently featured in Austin Woman magazine’s “Home” issue! It’s also available as a cool circular yoga pillow.

Mai’s products are incredibly diverse, too. They also paint these koi fish paperweights by hand:

               

And here’s everyone’s favorite measuring tape:

Lastly, don’t forget these fun and deliciously fragrant cinnamon bark boxes:

With Love,

Chief Becca

New pressed bamboo items in the store

Ten Thousand Villages of Austin has new items!  Artisans working with Viet House in Tay Ninh Province, Vietnam, craft this folding table from metal and pressed bamboo.  Pressed bamboo is a new technique the group has developed in recent years in response to a demand for a more modern look.  After it has been treated, pressed and sanded, bamboo can be used just like any other wood in furniture making.

Summer may be coming to an end, but you can enjoy this tropical look year-round!  Come on in and check out the set today! …Taylor

A customer service story

One Tuesday morning in July a customer came into the Austin Ten Thousand Villages Store on a special shopping mission. She wanted to purchase additions to a set of ceramic ware for her daughter.

I recognized our shopper’s description of the beautiful blue- green and black ceramic ware made in Vietnam and found that in the Austin store we had only two cups and one plate of the desired products.

Our Shopper was delighted to find the desired cup, but worried that we had only one dinner plate. What to do? Kitty, the store manager, quickly pulled up the Ten Thousand Villages inventory online, only to find that this ceramic ware had been discontinued. Our best hope was to find plate in another Villages store.

The shopper’s daughter lived in Indiana. A look in the Villages store directory gave us two stores in Indiana and Illinois that were in reasonable distances from her daughter’s home. We were able to continue our plate search over the telephone, speaking to friendly sales persons in both stores. The plate we wanted was remembered, but unfortunately neither store had any plates still in stock. They told us that this ceramic ware had been discontinued and wished us luck in our search.

Then we thought of calling the Houston, Texas store. We hoped that if the Houston store had a plate, it could be shipped to the Austin store where our shopper could happily complete her purchase.

The call to the Houston store was neighborly and fun. Yes, they had one of the desired plates in stock. Could they ship the plate to our Austin store? “Better than that,” the store manager told us. She was driving to Austin the very next day for a short visit with her daughter who lives here. The Houston manager told us if she had time she could make a quick drop off of the plate to our store.

Then from the back of our store, Kitty, who had been paying close attention to this plate search process, called out to us that she lived a couple of blocks from the Houston manager’s daughter here in Austin.

We told the Houston manager to bring the plate to Austin and leave it with her daughter. Kitty would pick up the plate in her neighborhood and bring it to the Austin store where our very happy shopper could pick it up.

We joined our shopper in a little celebration of our success with hugs and “high fives.” On my next day in the store, I learned that the plate had been delivered to our shopper according to plan making a very happy ending to this shopping story.

“Ask Me Why I Volunteer,” reads my name tag. I volunteer for opportunities such as this one in which I can help customers have pleasant and satisfying shopping experiences in our Austin Ten Thousand Villages Store.

written by Nancy Martin, volunteer