In 2024 we took an idea I had from our field visit in October 2023, and created a beadwork project in a rural village in the Tabora region of Tanzania. We then expanded our work last year from trading in Tanzania in 2 stores to 5 stores by the end of the year.
Our global Marketplace traded from our storefront and internationally to 16 countries, while completely supporting, training and funding our work in East Africa.
In July we expanded our work to employ Mathias as we created new products with weaving.
Our long term vision is to connect East African artisans to the global marketplace by creating creative employment. Our objective is to design, create, and trade our own unique, and premium quality products. Sustainable long term employment, paired with training and capacity building is empowering, and transformative.
But, for growth comes challenges.
We need your investment to enable us to build our capacity. For us to expand, we need a new team member to learn the sewing Esther currently does. So I can teach her how to make more complex products. To grow we need a second Industrial sewing machine for our Uhuru street store. If you can help us purchase the machine for $850, I can embark on training them this month.
Beyond this we need to move our buying power of resources to larger wholesale quantities to enable us to lower our materials costs.
We make and sell hundreds of Khanga and Maasai Shuka blankets to tourists in Tanzania each year. And we buy quality cotton yarn for our handcrafted tassels to enable them to be washable. We need your help to buy this in bulk. We need $750 to buy enough yarn to meet the wholesale minimum. This will dramatically help us save and enable us to put our income into staffing, artisans and development projects instead of overpaying for resources.
And our third area of resource need is beads.
We choose to work with Japanese produced Miyuki glass beads. Why? Because they are premium quality and wear beautifully. If you are going to go to all the effort to bead a bag, earrings, a ring or decoration, it needs to be made to last. One of our biggest weaknesses with artisan partners is poor quality resources. Lots of handiwork is ruined by rusted wire, beads that flake and break, cheap materials and lack of colour for collections and no variety in production.
Again, to buy enough beads to meet wholesale quantity and colours we need investment. We need $900 for all the beads we need so I can take them with me this month for our return to the village.
With your investment our work can grow to meet the demand for the opportunities that we have ahead of us. With growth we can invest in East Africa. We can work for change, we can invest in areas of need like healthcare, homes, schooling, transport, micro finance and families.