 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||
|
Boulder Magazine Summer 2009 Sévya Fair-Trade Shop Channels India By Molly Rettig Steps away from the rush of Pearl Street Mall sits a peaceful slice of India. Sévya, a fair-trade store, carries not replicas but authentic Indian handicrafts. The three-level shop welcomes customers with rose scents, jeweled purses, hand-painted piggy banks and sparkly earrings. On the second level await soft, handwoven bamboo scarves, racks of tunics, skirts and bright block-printed shirts, and hand-embroidered quilts. “This is bohemian with some New York bling,” says Adrienne Lorantos, holding up a dress embroidered with gold thread and dime-size mirrors. Since Lorantos bought the store in April 2008, she’s added “a little punk rock” to Sévya’s style while preserving its character. She buys the merchandise from the store’s former owners, Joan Rasch and Kovida Das, who opened Sévya in November 2006 and now run a fair-trade wholesale business from Lafayette.
Das—who previously ran a fashion school in India—and Rasch design Sévya’s clothing, jewelry and home-décor items, some of which they’ve infused with Lorantos’ edgier taste. They visit India twice a year, spending days training artisans and nights sleeping on their floors. Back home, they market products to museums and other fair-trade stores as well as Sévya. No brokers get between Sévya and its artisans. The only middlemen are the people who bike boxes of goods from rural villages to the nearest transportation nodes, and the drivers and train conductors who transport goods to Ahmedabad, a large city in the western state of Gujarat. From there, it’s straight to Colorado—most of the time. “My purses from last season fell off a bike into a mud pile, so they arrived a little dirty,” Lorantos says. “Another box of skirts accidentally got put in the back of a taxi and traveled around Asia for several months.” elephant-god inspires a big career change Two years ago, Lorantos never would have pictured herself in retail. For a decade she worked as a planner for Boulder County Land Use, frequenting Sévya’s space when it was still the General Store, just half a block from her office. “We’d always pop down before public hearings and grab a Coke,” she says. Once Sévya opened, Lorantos wasn’t lured inside until its going-out-of-business sale. Having assumed that fair trade was by definition expensive, she was surprised at the reasonable prices. She astonished herself by buying the business after dreaming of Ganesh—the elephant-headed Hindu god of success, the remover of obstacles—and spotting a picture of him on Sévya’s walls.
Since then, Lorantos has received a crash course in fair trade, a system that gives producers direct access to the market. Its main tenets are that craftspeople are paid fair wages, production is environmentally sustainable and workers can maintain their cultural identity. In a global economy, it’s all too easy to exploit cheap labor and perpetuate a cycle of poverty in places like rural India. Sévya’s model seeks to give workers not just a job but the freedom to work near their homes and earn the true market value of their goods. “Fair trade,” says Lorantos, “is about paying people fair wages and empowering them to thrive. It helps keep them from moving to the inner-city slums and putting out trinket dreamcatchers.” the lives behind the crafts Sévya (pronounced Save-ya) means “caring through service” in Sanskrit, and all of the brand’s products come with a human story. A new line of “young and frisky” skirts, for example, were sewn by a cooperative of women in Bangalore, in southern India. Sévya took the women—former beggars—off the streets, gave them a microloan to buy sewing machines, and organized a textile-scrap diversion program to supply them with materials.
Lorantos is careful not to oversell the stories. “I don’t want a sympathy shopper. I want people to buy skirts they’re going to wear,” she says. But Sévya skirts make more than a fashion statement. They tell how a little fair-trade shop in Boulder can change lives across the world.
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
