Fair Trade Innovates! In a Thousand Small Ways Every Day

May 11, 2019

We're celebrating World Fair Trade Day today.  This year's theme is Fair Trade Innovates. We recognize that innovations come in every manner, big and small, throughout not only a fair trade supply chain, but in the people's lives supported by fair trade.  

A fair trade value chain in the garment industry means each person is getting a living wage and able to feed and take care of their family.  This should be the norm, but in our world it is often only the norm within fair trade.  Once someone knows their livelihood is taken care of, they can plan for the future and make all the small day to day improvements for their family.  Our cutting master for example, can send his kids to a better quality school and make sure his daughter receives the same quality education as his son.  

When a person feels safe and supported in the work environment, they can work better, with more focus and improve their skills.  We take pride in training our tailors for instance, to make a garment start to finish and avoid assembly line production.  This means their skill set is improved, the feeling of job satisfaction, participation in the process, critical thinking skills and opportunities for job advancement.  

When workers have a chance to try out new ideas, techniques, are free to make suggestions and discuss as a team, creative innovations come about.

We had a stressful situation where we had a couple hundred meters of damaged fabric that we didn't want to throw away, but couldn't use for a manufacturing order.  Our block printing master put together a color palette that coordinated with the fabric color, choose several of our existing block prints and printed over the damaged fabric which masked the problems and ended up creating a very attractive new design which looked great and was not only usable, but looked good.  As we do both custom manufacturing and our own brand, we were able to use the fabric and develop a capsule collection just for this fabric--problem solved in a very innovative way!  And zero waste!

Our block printing master, along with our management team also recently came up with some fantastic innovations on our water filtration system.  We had run a crowd funding campaign and raised money for a new water filtration system for the wash water for our block printing unit.  We had looked at many models, talked with engineers and were in the end, frustrated with the overly technical, overly chemicalized (when it's the chemicals we are trying to move away from!), not user-friendly ETP systems (effluent treatment plants) we were seeing in the commercial/industrial market. 

Instead, we went back to the drawing board, did our own research and  designed a simpler, artisan friendly system at a fraction of the cost.  Then while building the artisan-friendly/earth-friendly system, our printer and management team took a hands-on approach and  became personally involved in the construction.  By this point, they understood each step of the process clearly and made a series of small innovations which made the system better, more energy efficient, easier to use and more scalable.  The moment of truth came when we got the system up and running and they immediately started explaining to artisans from other units how to build it for themselves!  

We have countless small examples over the years of ways in which our artisan team at Mehera Shaw have come up with great ideas, solved problems, found new and more effective methods of manufacture.  Ways our company has pooled our resources and been able to help workers with micro loans for their children's education, new houses to be built, medical emergencies. As a company, we've gone to the wedding for our worker's children, sisters, brothers.  We've celebrated births, graduations, marriages, new vehicles.  It is the respect, fair labor standards and team work that make this possible.  

Fair Trade innovates--in a thousand small ways every day!

#fairtrade #fairtradeinnovates #WFTD2019 #makeinindia

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