Sailing Through Summer

We have been cruising along for the first six month of 2007 averaging about $1000 each week in sales but we may have turned the corner. We just completed a great week at the marketplace. The great article that Beth Thames wrote in the Huntsville Times on Sunday June 17th (see below) really brought out the shoppers. Our sales exceeded $3000 this week which is our best since Christmas.

We also had a great response at the ArtWalk/ArtStroll downtown around the square on Thursday night. We had sale of over $700 for this event. We will be participating is this event every third Thursday through September. I think we may be starting the downhill (or is it uphill?) run to Christmas. I heard a couple of shoppers this week say they were buying for Christmas presents.

Shoppers at this market also toss lifeline to poor

Sunday, June 17, 2007
Huntsville Times
Attention shoppers: There's an alternative to the mall, the big-box store and the chain shops. It's called Trade Fair Marketplace, and it's right here in Huntsville.
Linda Worley opened this non-profit gift store in the fall of 2006 when she learned about fair trade - a global movement that compensates artisans from all over the world for their handmade goods. Fair trade insures that workers net 15-to-20 percent for the baskets, necklaces or pottery they've made. If you live in a developing country, squeezing by on a dollar a day, that 20 percent may be your lifeline.

Robin Sells, a volunteer at Trade Fair, says all staff members work for free. "We work two four-hour shifts a month. We don't get paid, but we believe in what we're doing," she says. "This store has changed people's lives."

One example of a changed life comes from Uganda, where a widow living in a 5- by 10-foot home had to give up her oldest son to a children's home. She had no money to feed him. Through Beadforlife, a fair trade organization which claims to "eradicate poverty one bead at a time," she learned to make beads out of recycled paper and to craft bracelets and necklaces.
Not only was she able to get her son back (fair trade companies pay as soon as workers make the goods), she was also able to enlarge her house and make room for a baby that police had found in a dumpster. She named the abandoned baby "Gift from God."
The Trade Fair Marketplace is a colorful hodgepodge of silver jewelry from Bangladesh, pottery bowls from Vietnam, elephant grass baskets from Ghana, and children's puppets from Peru. Scarves, handbags and carefully crafted metal objects from Haiti (Haitian workers recycle oil drums and pound them into wall hangings, Robin explains) decorate the walls.
Not all of the workers represented are from developing countries; some are from right here at home: The Women's Bean Project, a fair trade company in Denver, sells bean soups, sweets, coffee and bread mixes. It gives poor women a chance to learn a trade, keep a job and, in come cases, come in off the streets and smell the coffee.
Some shoppers come in to buy end-of-year gifts for teachers. One bride bought her bridesmaids gifts at Trade Fair. "The gifts are unique, very inexpensive, and you're improving someone's life," Robin says. Trade Fair does not advertise - that's too expensive - so most shoppers find out about the store through the oldest marketing ploy in the world: word of mouth. Volunteers also take the handmade items to local civic groups, to the recent downtown Arts Stroll, and anywhere they can to let people know they are here.
It seems to be working. Last Christmas, the first holiday season the store was opened, the gifts flew off the shelves. "I'm the receiving department," Robin says, "and I barely had time to put things on the shelf before they were gone."
One new idea Trade Fair is trying is the Birthday Club. You come in, sign up, and when you get a birthday card from Trade Fair you will get 20 percent off your next shopping trip there anytime during your birthday month.
There is a sign outside the Trade Fair Marketplace. It reads, "Hope and dignity with each purchase." I'm not sure any other store in town can make that guarantee.
Trade Fair, located in the lobby of Classic Hair and Nails on Regal Drive, is opened from 9 till 5, Monday through Saturday.


Huntsville resident Beth Thames is a freelance writer and an English instructor at Calhoun Community College. You can contact her at Beth.Thames@knology.net. She is taking a couple of weeks off, but her column will return on July 8.


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