Trade Aid: Fifty - not out
A shoulder bag in colourful striped cotton from Tibet was once an unofficial emblem of Trade Aid. You wore it, you symbolically nailed your ethics to the mast, at one with the Tibetan struggle.
“It was a Trade Aid signature product for years and years,” says Vi Cottrell, who founded Trade Aid with her husband, Richard, 50 years ago.
But the hippy-style hand-woven bag is long gone, and Trade Aid is now much more than just ethically produced Christmas decorations and woven baskets. The 24 shops around the country now generate only 25-30% of the annual turnover, long surpassed by coffee, tea and chocolate, wholesaled and sold in mainstream retailers.
This year, turnover reached $23 million, well up on 1989 when it made its first $1 million.
Trade Aid now supplies 20% of New Zealand’s non-instant coffee in supermarkets, cafes and other outlets (in many cases delivering fair trade green beans to local roasters who market them under their own labels). But chief executive Geoff White says wherever you see coffee labelled organic or fair trade, you’ll know Trade Aid has been a link in the supply chain. Over the past 12 months, it has imported 1800 tonnes of coffee.
The taxpaying charity is also the top organic chocolate supplier in the country, says White. It set up its own chocolate factory, Sweet Justice, in 2014, and supplies Trade Aid-branded chocolate to 178 Countdown supermarkets nationwide.
Diversifying further, it began supplying storage baskets to Briscoes last March for its online store, and “it’s going extremely well”, says White. Large companies sometimes struggle to meet demand for ethically made product, but with its historical relationships, Trade Aid has suppliers all over the world. It is now working on supplying other big retailers.
Markets for carpets
Trade Aid was the inspiration of the Christchurch-based Cottrells. Richard, a lawyer, was contracted to work with Tibetan refugees in northern India in 1970 (about 100,000 people had fled Tibet in the wake of China’s 1950s takeover). Vi found work sourcing foreign markets for the carpets and bags made by craftspeople in settlement camps. The goods were sold in Germany, the UK and the US. The Cottrells returned home after two years in India but planned to keep finding markets for the Tibetans’ work.
Initially, they assumed they would wholesale the products, once the all-important import licence was acquired (quite a rigmarole in those trade-protected times). Paperwork done, they imported $1000 worth of carpets, and those 15-20 rugs sold out in 10 minutes.
Next came the Tibetan bags, imported as strips of cloth woven on back-strap looms. The fabric was made into bags by what is now social enterprise employer Kilmarnock Enterprises, and sold in Beath’s Department Store in Christchurch.