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from The Ledger

More Furniture Designers are Incorporating a Social Conscience

By EILS LOTOZO

PHILADELPHIA - The latest design trend has nothing to do with which colors are out or which styles are in. What's new in the design world is a growing social conscience.

That phenomenon was nowhere more apparent than at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York, where any number of high-end firms displayed their efforts to connect first-world consumers with needy third-world artisans.

Toronto designer Patty Johnson, for example, showed sleek wooden furniture made in Botswana through her new North South Project, aimed at aiding industry in developing countries. And Los Angeles manufacturer Artecnica had on view a dramatic Tord Boontje-designed chandelier made from crochet work and fabric flowers by a craft cooperative in the slums of Rio de Janeiro.

This type of venture may be new to some, but it's been business as usual for Ten Thousand Villages for 60 years.

A pioneer of the fair-trade movement, which attempts to ensure a living wage and humane working conditions for farmers and workers in the developing world, the nonprofit company, with headquarters just north of Lancaster in Akron, Pa., now has 100 stores selling the gift and home-furnishings products it buys from 110 artisan groups in 35 countries.

Ten Thousand Villages opened its newest store in Media, Pa. - which announced in October its intention to jump on a trend that's sweeping Europe and become the first Fair Trade Town in the United States.

With a 25 percent bump in sales this fiscal year, to $20 million, and a new e-commerce site, tenthousandvillages.com, the company has come a long way from its start in 1946.

That's when a Mennonite church volunteer named Edna Ruth Byler decided one way to alleviate the poverty she saw on a visit to Puerto Rico was to buy some of the fine embroidery produced in a Mennonite-sponsored sewing class and sell it out of the trunk of her car to friends and neighbors.

Ten Thousand Villages now carries 2,500 to 3,000 different items, with 500 products introduced each year. While jewelry and gift items are plentiful, the biggest category by far in the stores is home decor.

Among the handsome offerings are bamboo furniture from Vietnam and the Philippines (consoles, coffee tables and benches, priced from $44 to $175), glazed ceramic table lamps from Nicaragua ($110), elaborately carved shesham wood mirrors and room screens from India ($68 to $650), embroidered wall hangings from Indonesia ($200), and intricately patterned blue-and-white pottery from Vietnam ($12 to $48).

The operation is still a project of the Mennonite Central Committee, with a chief executive officer whose message in the company's annual report mixes talk of sales figures with a reminder about honoring God.

"Our mission, simply stated, is to alleviate poverty," says marketing director Larry Spangler, who spent more than a decade at Thomasville Furniture before coming to Ten Thousand Villages six months ago to lead a new drive to get the "buy with a good conscience" message out to consumers.

"There are a lot of misconceptions out there about fair trade," Spangler says. "One of the most-asked questions in the stores is, 'What percentage of what I spend goes to the artisan?'

"The answer is: We're not a charity. The way we operate is we pay fair prices, and the more we sell, the more we can buy. And the more we buy, the more communities we buy from can be self-sustaining."

Bob Chase, president and CEO of SERRV International, a Madison, Wis., group with a similar mission, called Ten Thousand Villages a leader in the fair-trade movement.

"You can depend on Ten Thousand Villages for integrity. They are very careful not to make unsupported claims. They do what they say they do ... and do it well.

"They always put the interests of the low-income people they strive to serve ahead of their own corporate advancement."

Coming up with fair prices is a complex process for Ten Thousand Villages, which helped found the International Fair Trade Association in 1989.

"We actually sit and work with them on it. We ask them how much the raw material costs, how long does it take to make, what does it take to feed your family?" says Stacy Spivak, who covered West Africa and Southeast Asia as a buyer for the company before shifting into a newly created position of product designer.

Also unusual among retail buyers is the fact that once Ten Thousand Villages commits to a producer - which can range from a family group to a village to a nongovernmental organization set up to help artisans - the producer can count on sales for years.

"We don't drop them to go after the latest thing or the cheapest price," Spivak says.

That's a way of doing business that can transform communities, she says. She has seen an artisan group in the Philippines whose workshop flooded year after year grow prosperous enough to put the building on stilts, and watched families who didn't have enough to eat go on to buy plots of ground, build houses, and send their children to school.

In one rural village in Bangladesh, where women weave jewelry and decorative objects out of palm fronds, years of steady sales to Ten Thousand Villages have boosted the number of weaving positions from seven to 65. New shops have opened nearby, further expanding the local economy, and profits have allowed the weavers to dig a well, which they share with the community.

"Our concept is the best product is a mix between what they are bringing from their cultural context and what we're bringing in terms of what the market wants," says Spivak, a former New York textile designer.

With a never-ending need for fresh items for the stores, what the market often requires is some creative tweaking of craft traditions.

The Vietnamese, who have a government organization with a staff of designers who help craftspeople, are particularly innovative, Spivak says. The village of potters that makes those striking blue-and-white wares, for example, has added to its line an oversized cup and saucer and a single-serving teapot/cup combo.

The Indonesians are also great experimenters, she says. One group came up with a way of adapting traditional batik methods to create a vibrantly colored surface pattern on small wooden accent tables.

Another created wildly patterned, hand-painted mirrors and pillar-candle holders that have the look of a Gustav Klimt painting.

The effort to buy the indigenous handicrafts of struggling communities abroad has evolved into more of a design-driven enterprise, Spivak says.

"We're much more focused on product development, and we're putting more of an effort into trend forecasting. We're also putting more energy into working with artisans and setting colors for collections and making the collections tell a story."

As for those trends, Spivak says, "global is in, eclectic is in, and handmade is really in this year.

"We just laugh, because those are the things we've always done."