Capacity-building for rural women artisans in Peru

Hello friends!

In 2021, your generosity has supported both our ongoing emergency food relief program, and our work to help the artisans adapt their businesses to the new market realities. 

In our food relief program, we have distributed 1,956 monthly food baskets to 163 artisans and their families, providing a steady source of food through all the economic uncertainty of the past two years. 

Our design and production team has also been working with our artisan partners to create more products that are adapted to the online pandemic market, including our first ever throw blanket! As with any new product, our team has done many trainings and the artisans are making many samples. This throw also uses a thick handspun alpaca yarn, which our partners have not woven with before. It has been a long time since we have been able to experiment with new techniques and processes, and we have had some great learning come out of it. 

For example, one innovation that has come out of this process is that for the first time, we have been able to turn to our cooperatives to source alpaca fleece from their own animals. Previously we bought fleece from other regions. The village of Kelkanca, our most remote partner village, has always raised alpaca. but never with enough fleece or enough quality fleece for us to be able to buy from them. Due to recent improvements they have made, we are now able to buy fleece from our artisan partners there, and keep those funds in the village. We then take that fleece to our partner cooperatives in Huilloc to spin into a chunky yarn. The yarn goes to our partner knitting cooperatives back in Ollantaytambo, or in the case of the new collection, we take that yarn to the Awac Phuna cooperative or back to Kelkanca, where we dye it and the artisans weave it into the blanket. 

The process hasn't been without challenges, but thanks to your support we are able to take the time and materials we need to teach, experiment and collaborate with the artisans. We are so excited to share our work with you in the new year!

Meanwhile in tourism, bookings are starting to trickle back in. Our resilient artisan partners have spent the past two years supporting their kids who were home from school, farming to feed their families, shearing sheep and alpaca, and weaving. They have been waiting to get back to work. As tourism slowly returns, we aim to spend the next year working with the Awac Phuna cooperative of 25 women to equip them to host returning tourists in a sustainable, respectful, covid-conscious way. 

We hope you will join us! Donations this season will support training, equipment and startup costs for their business. We believe in our artisan partners and their ability to lead the way out of the extended crisis that Peru has seen for the pandemic. Let's end the year with hope, and invest together in the women who will ensure a brighter future for their families and villages. 

We are so excited to be getting back to work with our partner artisans. Thanks to your generous support we have started designing a capsule home collection. The idea behind this collection is to create something that appeals directly to the customers from our online store so that we can open new markets for our partner artisans.

Until COVID, most of our customers were tourists in Peru, and we didn't sell very much online in the U.S. Tourists in Peru, who bought from us and directly from the artisans, always loved naturally-dyed yarn and traditional Andean motifs in our artisan partners' textiles. Each of those textiles were unique and we only sold them in Peru. In the U.S., we have sold items with designs that blended Andean and modern styles. 

We have always gotten a lot of requests for this type of traditional Andean design in our online store, but we have never had the ability to create something traditional that we could produce at scale, which is necessary to sell online. Now, with your support, we are excited to be doing that for the first time and developing a collection of home items with beautiful traditional Andean motifs.

For this mini collection, we working with the artisans to create a very traditional Andean design in a contemporary product shape. We will have a collection of pillows but the star of the pillow show will be a very long lumbar pillow that incorporates traditional embroidery/stitching, as well as traditional designs. We will be using yarn that the artisans spin themselves out of alpaca fleece that we buy directly from our artisans and other area alpaca farmers--which helps us generate more income for our partners and their villages. We are planning to dye the yarn using traditional plant dyes. Our first dye workshop with the artisans is next week.

After the yarn is dyed, we will be working with the artisans to support their leadership with the pillow designs. Typically when we design a product to sell in the U.S., our Mexican-American-Peruvian (at heart) designer takes the lead and works with the artisans to incorporate their designs into a contemporary piece that is more popular in the U.S. With this piece, we will be working with the artisans in workshops to explain design principles and ask them to create samples based on examples and ideas, rather than explicit instructions. We have always worked closely with the artisans in the design process, but for this project we will have a series of trainings and then ask them to come up with the final designs.  

Your support for this project has been crucial. We are so grateful to you, not only for helping us bring a new product to market that will give our artisan partners a new sales channel, but also for trusting us to find a new way to do this. We are doing so many things we have never done before! We are weaving with a rustic, handspun, chunky yarn--usually used for knitting, not weaving--that our partners make. Not only are we weaving with it, but we are also dyeing it, whereas until now we have only used it in its undyed colors of black, brown and white. Our artisans are building new skills and developing new products as we do this. Finally, we are so excited to experiment with this new method of design collaboration. We think this home collection will be stunning and we are excited to bring you along. Thank you!