OUR STORY
How it Began
A crossroads in my career came in early 2008, when I found myself craving a new opportunity. I longed to marry my creative background, my love for travel, and my experience in fashion with a career that would enable me to make a difference in the world.
On a crisp April night in 2008, a longtime friend invited me to see a screening of her friend’s documentary. Oddly, I had a fateful sense that I had to go. After the screening about a young Kenyan woman, the audience was invited to purchase items the filmmaker had brought back from Kenya to help finance her film. There were the sandals!
At first sight, I, like most other women at the screening, was enthralled with the sandals; the style, workmanship, and comfort were all great. When the filmmaker told me that many of the sandals were handmade by needy Kenyan women, some of whom were living with HIV/AIDS, I knew I wanted to lend a hand. My instant thought was that I could commercialize the sandals in the US in hopes of providing jobs for the women artisans, thus helping to improve their lives.
The right person at the right place
My professional experience includes years working as a wardrobe stylist and as an international home accessories buyer; my livelihood has largely depended on my keen eye for design and a knack for recognizing exceptional items of interest. Having spent years scouring the globe for unique and marketable products in my career, I knew at once that I’d found a special product in the sandals.
My gut told me other women would love these sandals, just as I did, and for the same reasons. In addition, my ten years’ experience importing Mexican folk art, handmade by artisans in a tiny rural village, also gave me the confidence that I had the skills to do it. But Africa, I thought!!??
I’d never been to sub-Saharan Africa, but I had dreamed of going most of my life. I reasoned, “This has fallen in my lap, and it doesn’t come much more up my alley, so it must be meant to be.”
My hunch about a positive market response was confirmed by the orders I took as soon as I began to show the sandals to store buyers in California.
Dream becomes a reality
With orders in hand, before I knew it, I was off to Kenya to meet with artisans and to start organizing the process of having sandals made for export. Nowadays, our sandals are an advanced iteration of the original shoes I’d purchased from the filmmaker, but the idea and process are the same.
Now, nineteen years and almost thirty trips to Kenya later, I can say that I have reached my initial goal of providing good-paying jobs to many Kenyan women (and men also) and now offer you the wonderful sandals and other handcrafted items these talented artisans make.
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HANDMADE WITH QUALITY MATERIALS
WOMEN SUPPORTING WOMEN
POSITIVE COMMUNITY IMPACT