Tag Archives: Jewelry
Sales Force
Haiti’s Jewels, LLC is a wholesale company partnering with Haitian artists to design, produce, and sell beautiful jewelry made of recycled materials and local Haitian products.
In my opinion the business’ success is truly determined by its sustainability. If Haitians are unable to operate something, how will it have any resounding value? Part of making this company sustainable is finding bulk buyers… wholesale customers. The focus on large scale buyers has been necessary to build the wonderful group of clients we now have.
Bret Pinson is one of these individual buyers who is quickly expanding a market for HJ in Baton Rouge, LA. He is on the board of Respire Haiti and has been coming to Haiti regularly for the past two years.
“This was one of the first tangible economics development projects in the area that had early success and momentum (creating jobs and changing lives), the initial market response was outstanding; women absolutely love the story, the jewelry and most of all, the purpose!” –Bret
I met Bret in June of 2012 when he came down to Haiti on a service trip with his church, The Chapel from Baton Rouge, LA. He’s a consultant who works independently with a growing number of companies across the United States… so naturally one of the first things we did was talk. Bret got the whole story of Haiti’s Jewels, the artisans, myself, the business plan, and then asked one fateful question, “How can I help?”
At the time SALES were a problem for us. We were selling enough jewels to break even and inventory was stacking up. I asked Bret to help by buying a wholesale package to sell it to his friends and associates. I knew that between his outgoing personality and large network, they would sell quickly. I didn’t expect, however, that he would become Haiti’s Jewels’ #1 individual buyer, impacting Gressier in a new way…
“I am a management consulting and a big part of my practice area is executive recruiting. (I have) recruited dozens of CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and many other leadership positions. Once those jobs are filled there is some satisfaction from a job well done. That being said, nothing in my professional life has ever given me the fulfillment that working with you (Haiti’s Jewels) and the many others that are working to serve our Haitian brothers and sisters. Helping an affluent American secure another position is one thing but helping a Haitian feed their family, pay for education, provide funds for life threatening medical care, and all the many other life changing things has a depth and purpose that supersedes success in the excessively abundant world we live in here.” –Bret
Individuals are just as strong as businesses when it comes to sales. Haiti’s Jewels is still in need of individuals who are interested in adopting a unique story and product to share with their community.
1. You further a culture of socially responsible business in Haiti- a nation where 90% of it’s population are unemployed.
2. Jewelry has a 2-3x retail value. You can make 50-70% profit on every piece sold.
3. By building a network of people who become passionate about the jewelry, the story, and the artisans, you will be able to expand your market by supplying and selling to other individuals.
email info@haitisjewels.com for more information.
Dynamic Duo: Grockisanz Pt. 2
In the last week Haiti’s Jewels has been blessed with two new, completely original, GROCKISANZ (glass and rock artisans). I wrote a few days ago describing our first tremendous trio and today I’ll introduce you to two more… making the FABULOUS FIVE!
CHRISMATE PIERRE: UREYTHANG GURL
I met Chrismate my second week in Gressier because of her rambunctious, adorably verbal five year old son. Every day, as I was walking up the mountain to Bellevue School, I would hear a munchkin scream, “Blaaaaaaaaaaaan!!! (White girl) Comment vas-tu?” I thought it was pretty adorable that this little kid shrieked down to me every day just to practice his French and by the 5th or 6th time I decided to go introduce myself as someone other than “Blan.” I walked up the hill and talked to little Robenson, introduced myself to Chrismate, and made sure they both knew that my skin was actually brown, not white. 😉
We talked for a few minutes but I quickly had to tear myself away because I was already forty-five minutes late for a visit to a dear friend of mine, Madame Vil. Story-of-my-life. I waved goodbye and Robenson screamed after me, “SCHOOPHIE, Bonne journée!” “Bye-bye,” I waved back. As I walked past the school I stopped dead in my tracks and almost slapped myself right upside-da-head. Why the hell didn’t I invite her to come jewelry class? Ughhh. On my way back home, later that afternoon, I stopped by her house again but the neighbor said she had gone to the market. Shoot. By monday, our next class, I had completely forgotten about my brain fart and was focused on teaching Donald to make double tiered earrings. Chrismate came up to the iron door and peeked in on the class. It’s like she read my mind! I was so stoked to see her that I told to Donald to ‘just keep practicing’ and took almost the entire class period to work with Chrismate. It’s always really hard with women, I don’t know why, to do the wire wrapping. It never makes any sense to me because I am a woman and obviously have a knack for wire, so… why do I have such a hard time finding other women in Haiti who can wrap the glass? But my gut told me she would learn. Tuesday class: Chrismate walked in and dumped 15 wire wrapped rocks onto the table, “Look Sophie, I’ve been practicing!” Most of them were actually wrapped pretty well. I was shocked. Sure I believed in her and everything… but this definitely surpassed my expectation. Within a couple weeks, she’ll be wrapping as well as any of the other Grockisanz.
MONSIEUR RICHARD PIERRE: QUALITY COMES FIRST
Richard joined us for class a few weeks ago because he had heard Wilnes had a new job wrapping rocks and wanted to check it out. He must have taken a few tips from Wilnes because he invaded my same three pet peeves. He stood over my shoulder, just inches from my ear, breathed down my neck, and blocked 90% of my light. Aww brings back memories. This time I waited a few minutes before I said anything just to see what would happen. He said, while breathing into my ear, “thaaat…breath.. looks easyyyy… breath…” “Really?” I said, offering him a challenge, “why don’t you sit yourself down and give it a try? I ate my own words, so to speak, because he is the most detail oriented Haitian I’ve ever met. He made two pairs of earrings in an hour, painstakingly slow, but they were without any imperfections.
Richard is a good deal older than any of our other grockisanz and has, in just few days, proved himself to be the wise, stable leader in eclectic crew. He is always telling us that “bon dye renmen nou” (good lord loves us) and other Gospel essentials. He came to class on Friday with 5 pairs of perfectly wrapped earrings. I couldn’t believe a human’s hands had wrapped pairs of earrings so identically. How? So his motto is one to remember and value quality>quantity.
I feel very blessed to already be working with five talented jewelry makers. I never, EVER, expected training to move so quickly.
Together they make the fabulous five and with yours truly we make the SENSATIONAL SIX.
Much love from Ayiti Cherie!
GROCKISANS
Grockisans: Artisans, particularly Haitians involved in Haiti’s Jewels, who use rocks and recycled broken glass bottles as their premiere artistic medium.
I can’t tell you how proud I am to begin to introduce them to you. For simplicity, I will translate our conversations into english.
Madame Vil Franch: Queen of the Recycled Plastic Feathers
(woah. that’s a great movie title) ^
The first week I was in Gressier, in early February, I was walking home from visiting one of the students in Bellevue when a woman shouted out to me from her front step, “Yo, white girl, do you have a little gift for me?”
This was nothing new. I sighed and said, for maybe the fourth time that day, “What do you think I have to give you? What would you even want that gift to be?”
She laughed and my spirits were lifted a bit “White girl, you know I’m just joking- but if you still want to give me something, I trust your judgement”
and wham. Just like that, we became buds. She offered me a chair and we sat on her front step talking about life for the next two hours. I had to make her repeat herself all the time, as my creole is still cave-man-esque, but it became very clear to me in those hours why I loved Ayiti Cherie so much. We talked until the sun went down and the rain began to fall and I still didn’t really want to leave. She was such a bro. Madame Vil France, has five children, a husband who’s no longer around, and strong desire to work. “Sitting is no thing to do in Haiti,” she told me, “no matter how hot it is, we almost all want a job.” Madame Vil sends her five children to school everyday, three go to Carrefour (10 miles to the east) and two go to Leogane (10 miles to the west, and the epicenter of 2010 earthquake). This woman, with next to no income, spends every dime she gets on her children’s education. She is empowering herself and her children and investing in the future. I’d be crazy not to invest in her!
The next day, after visiting another Ti Moun at the Bellevue school, I stopped in again and invited her to come to a little jewelry class up at the school. Madame was the only one, out of the four parents I invited, who showed up. She wanted this, I could tell. I struggled, at first, to find jewelry that she could do well despite her shaky hands. I really wanted to find something that could be her specialty, her territory.
Plastic Feathers. What? Yes.
They’re really quite simple to make but quite time consuming and require someone with gentle hands and patience. This was Madame Vil.
In two days she made 150 feathers and discovered beautiful red bottles to make HIV awareness earrings with red feathers. I’m very excited about the future with Madame Queen of Feathers.
Wilnes Pierre: Rock Extravaganza
I first met Wilnes when he came into our jewelry class and invaded three of my most sacred pet peeves: he stood right over my shoulder, breathed down my neck, and blocked 90 % of my light. After about 15 seconds I whipped my head around and said, “Do you want to SIT down?” He laughed and grabbed the chair right next to me saying, “That looks fun.” I welcomed the idea of a new student and handed him a tool set. Wilnes didn’t even need me to show him how to wrap a rock. Those 15 seconds of standing over my shoulder were enough. He wrapped the little white stone and then started making spacer beads with the scraps of wire. WHO IS THIS DUDE? He’s Wilnes. And he’s our official rock wrapper. He’s got a tiny baby and is engaged to be married this month. He gave me a wedding invitation the day after he met me. We have a line of rock bracelets and necklaces that is operated by him.
Donald King of the Zanno.
(Zanno is the Creole word for Earring).
Donald is a 17 year old boy who walked into class two weeks ago and asked to try making earrings. I showed him a couple pairs of glass earrings and he quickly and easily recreated them. Donald is in 11th grade and lives for education and the dream of studying in the states. Unfortunately his English is horrendous and he knows it! We practice English every day at 4 o’clock while we make earrings and learn new techniques. He’s really good at making earrings. In two weeks he has made over thirty pairs of glass earrings in class alone. I normally factor in two weeks for training alone, but Donald is the king.
Last wednesday I handed him an envelope of cash to pay him for the beautiful earrings he had made. Donald opened the envelope, peeked inside, and then handed it back to me saying, “I didn’t think we were getting paid for this! I just wanted to learn to make jewelry! If you give me cash like this, I will only spend it on things I don’t really need. What I need is to study in the states”
I was stunned. What? Who turns down cash? After 20 minutes of convincing him that he would eventually need money if/when he went to the states and that saving for university, whether in Haiti or in the US, was a smart idea, he finally agreed that we should create an account so that he can save up all the money he gets from jewelry making and not spend it until there is something truly important for his funds. He’s a smart kid.
So there, you’ve met them… the TREMENDOUS THREE!
I feel so unbelievably shocked and proud to know these three talented, diverse people. It was certainly not me who discovered them, yet somehow we all found each other. I’m so grateful for how quick, simple, and… beautiful this process has been. I was expecting to spend three months looking Grockisanz… But within two weeks we have three superstars! It’s DIVINE.
Social Entrepreneurship, Yo
For the past two years, starting with my time in Ounaminthe, I’ve lost countless hours of sleep struggling with a very real issue: what works?
In Haiti, I was blown away by how much money was being invested in huge economic-expansion projects, government subsidized medical care, countless NGO salaries, and things as simple as orphanages and sponsored schools. The economy expansion projects were building multi-million dollar structures with imported materials and foreign labor, while international medical care kept people from supporting, or even developing, Haitian hospitals, and orphanages were an excuse for children to be separated from their parents by something as insignificant as ten dollars a day. It seemed like these billions of dollars were just being thrown away- or invested solely in making a nation of dependents.
What is a man to do when his own children are starving because he makes less than $100 a month working 70 hour/wks making sure that the over-fed, nicely clothed, and well-educated children in the orphanage never miss a meal or have a few hours without electricity? What sharp minded man wouldn’t love his children enough to want the same things for them? His salary per month is the same price as the diesel the orphanage used for it’s generator in an afternoon. The sad thing about this man’s story is that he was actually doing well, according to Haitian wage standards because he had a steady income. When 95% of the children in orphanages are only there because their parents couldn’t afford to keep them, we must realize that there is something vastly wrong with the way we are approaching family care. Patronizing a system of economic orphans plagues a nation with an even larger culture of orphanhood, one that is passed from generation to generation.
So what is the solution to overwhelming, deeply embedded problem? I wish those hundreds of sleepless nights had produced some sort of solution- an answer that made perfect sense. But there is no quick fix for this problem; this nation of broken families. So before we come into this place, with our big donor money, fancy jeeps, and high-end, all-american standards for doing “life,” we just need to learn. For someone that easily relies on my initial assumptions and rash conclusions, it’s refreshing to be in a place where I’m just a wide-eyed kid again. Everything is new: new language, people, culture, and lifestyle; we’re just soaking it all in.
A localized solution to some of the things I’m learning about, come from the ApParent project. It’s a business that started by learning from people, learning what the needs of a nation are, and beginning with a tiny community of artists. Shelley and Corrigan Clay have been developing a non-profit social business for three years and their labor (along side of 180 Haitian artists) is apparent within the community. The nature of this business, and it’s innovative team of designers, keeps them out on the forefront of their peers. I’ve seen many small missions and organizations take their ideas, but none compare in quality or creativity because the people in power work in very separate spheres from those actually creating the product. AP has spent years working side-by-side with the real artists and this makes them unique. I feel very honored to be working with them.
Localized solutions, like AP, may be the beginning of a much more global resolution to end poverty and aid-related dependency. I advocate what the ApParent Project is doing because they’ve learned to learn- which is more exciting, to me, than anything else.
Haiti's Jewels 