Thistle Farms, a Nashville nonprofit, has already created a successful business selling bath and body products — while helping its workforce of former prostitutes rebuild their lives and careers. It’s now teaming up with likeminded businesses in five continents with the goal of helping women around the world escape poverty.
The Shared Trade online marketplace sells jewelry from India, fabric from Mozambique and silk scarves from Cambodia, among other products. But what Thistle Farms also wants customers to buy is its vision.
“We can make a difference to women’s lives all over the world,” says Abi Hewitt, Shared Trade’s marketing director. “We are already buying products that are made globally. But the idea of being able to buy products that are made globally and ensure that that’s happening in an equal and fair way is, to me, the most exciting way of enabling economic change.”
Normally, Hewitt says, a U.S. vendor will buy products from another country at a fraction of the price it sells them for. The Shared Trade initiative gives more of that profit back to the producers.
It’s similar to the concept behind fair trade, for example. But unlike in fair trade, Thistle Farms is partnering solely with businesses that want to improve the lives of impoverished women.
“We’re working with women all over the world who have been experiencing sex trafficking, violence, abuse, addiction,” Hewitt says, “and also the realities of a harsh, harsh economic situation that has kept them in poverty for a long time.”
Those are the same issues that women at Thistle Farms have faced, she says.
Thistle Farms will be the vendor and distribution hub for these products in the U.S. Right now, sales will be primarily through the website, SharedTrade.org.
Hewitt says, based on Thistle Farms’ initial order, one business partner in Kenya has already hired two more women.
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