Trade As One

Our good friend Bart Edwards runs Hagar on Time in Cambodia. They produce many of the beautiful bags we sell here, (you can see their products here). At our event with Willow Creek Community Church last month, each person who placed an order received one of these luggage tags, and many of the folks at Willow Creek purchased Hagar bags. Bart recorded this message as a thank you. It’s a nice look in to their factory, and a welcome reminder that the purchasing decisions we make make every day have a direct impact in the developing world. Take a look:

We’ve begun our first round of interviews with our summer internship applicants, and we’re all pretty excited to get started. We never seem to suffer from a lack of things to do, so it will be great to get some interns in here to help.
So far the quality of the applicants has been superb, and the people we’re interviewing are both talented and passionate. And in light of their many talents, we’re not going to be giving them boring jobs (no one will be making copies or making coffee runs). We’ve got significant projects that will go a long way towards our success this year, and we’re going to trust our interns to run point.
Should be an amazing summer, as our team grows (albeit temporarily) in size and skills. Now if we could only get some A/C in here….

It’s T-Minus 31 hours until Mother’s Day, and we couldn’t be happier about it. Our Moms are incredible, and it is pretty easy to shop for fair trade Mother’s Day gifts when you work in a warehouse full of them. So we got that going for us.
As we’ve been…

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We’re one weekend into our 3 week event with Willow Creek Community Church. One of the thrusts of the whole event is that our actions here in America…

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In two days Celebration of Hope 2009 will begin. We’re so thrilled to be a part of this amazing event. For three weekends, Willow Creek will turn their eyes and their hearts toward the developing world. This year, they’re focusing on clean water issues, highlighting the unbelievable reality faced by 1.1 Billion people worldwide: no clean water.
Last year, the Willow congregation provided more than 40,000 hours of dignified, stable employment in the developing world in just two weekends. This year, we’re there for three weekends, and we can’t wait to see what will happen. But before we dive into Celebration of Hope 2009, we should revel a bit in what happened last year. We put together a video that does just that. Take a look at it here, and if you’re in the Chicagoland area, come out and see us!