The handmade nature of our products is an important part of our company’s mission. Central to our operation is a reliance on human power to produce our goods. While some companies might reject this reliance on human power as a limitation to growth, we instead choose to utilize it as a strength: for aesthetic reasons of quality and attention to detail, for economic reasons of conservation of energy and the support of the local economy, for psychological reasons of the appeal of handmade products, for ideological reasons of valuing human labor and effort and human scales of production and capacity.
As Helena Norberg-Hodge says in ‘Buddhism in the Global Economy’, “”At a structural level, the fundamental problem is one of scale. The ever-expanding scale of the global economy obscures the consequences of our actions. In effect, our arms have been so lengthened that we no longer see what our hands are doing. In smaller communities people can see the effects of their actions and take responsibility for them.” While we, as Westerners, can’t always see the effects of our actions, they are being played out in places like India, which makes the problem immediate in a very real way. By shortening our “arms”, the hope is that we will see how our decisions effect our communities and therefore make decisions with positive effects.
When you buy a product from a artisan producer you are supporting an individual, but you are also supporting all the people along their personal and business supply chain. We seek to incorporate sustainability—environmental, economic and social—into all of our practices. What this means to a customer goes further than a healthy, organic product on your own or your loved ones’ bodies. Each stitch of the shirt, each plant which was used to extract dye from, each process or material used along a lifecycle of a product (which are usually not visible in the final product of most goods we buy!) was conceived with attention to these sustainability metrics. I think a smaller scale, while perhaps not “cost effective” or “industrial” enough for the big players, provides for a lot more attention and appreciation of what environmental and social responsibility means! Our family owned business not only can still “see what our own hands are doing” but keep an eye on the family too!
a beautiful special order