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Ethical, Craftsmanship and Natural Materials

Our mission at Collective-Stories is to create sustainable incomes for artisans around the world, while preserving  local culture and traditional crafts. We founded Collective-Stories with a passion for uniting contemporary design and ethical craftsmanship. Seeing first hand how many natives in Guatemala are reliant on selling their traditional crafts, it was important for us to keep these alive. It is important to us that through Collective-Stories we are addressing some of the issues that have been caused by cheap mass production as we believe that there are various measures that can be taken to improve current manufacturing processes for homeware products, such as ensuring that workers are paid fairly and work in safe conditions. 

Our collaboration enables the artisans to access sustainable employment, including fair wages and safe working conditions which then leads to continued development and better living standards. We work with different cooperatives, which all have an overall mission to improve the livelihoods of their artisans and communities.

To give a few examples:

1. In Guatemala we work with a Non Profit organization that supports the cooperatives we work with there. They provide personal and professional training to the artisans, they preserve and promote community health by teaching the artisans how they can make traditional medicine from plants that they can grow in the communal garden that they have established. And they support the artisans' children with financial scholarships.

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2. The cooperative in Mexico was created out of need for women who had limited opportunities to support their families either because they were single, or widowed if their husband had migrated abroad for work. The women support each other and help transform their local community through workshops with topics such as domestic violence, traditional medicine, health care and weaving.

3. In the Philippines, we work with a cooperative which was established by the wife of a sugar cane farm owner. She saw an opportunity to gather the wives of the sugar cane workers to make crafts as a way of generating an extra income. This has made a difference for the families, who now have a double income, and the wifes can work from home while still taking care of the family and the household. The extra income has allowed for better nutrition and for the families to now send their kids to school.

The Parallel Cushion will always be special to me, as this was the very first product we developed with the artisans in Guatemala. It was a big learning curve for us, as we had to learn the restrictions and possibilities of the traditional backstrap weave. I find that the brocade detail on the Parallel Cushion is unique from other cushions on the market and I feel that it really highlights the craftsmanship that goes into the product.

For several reasons:

- Natural materials are often more durable

- Tend to have much fewer toxins than for example plastics like polyester, that require multiple toxic chemicals to manufacture.

- Better for the environment, as natural materials means less processing = less waste, less electricity and less chemical runoff.

- Natural materials decompose better and cause less harm to the environment when you dispose of the item compared to plastics.

We are looking to grow and add more variety to our collection. We are currently working on some new products with new artisans which we hope to launch early next year. And we have some exciting collaborations coming up, but we can’t share more about that yet, but the timeline for that is also early next year.