Norwood Park Resident & Entrepreneur Owns Successful Fair Trade Jewelery Business

Congratulations on your sucessful business and commitment to the fair trade philosophy...

From today's Sun-Times:

Fair Trade Biz Sells Itself

By:  Sandra Guy

As a program manager at an educational nonprofit group in India, Bharathi Gunasekaran was struck by how the artisans and craftsmakers she met relied on fair-trade work to support their families.

“It is tangible,” said Gunasekaran, who recently moved to Chicago. “I got to travel to major cities such as Calcutta, Bangalore, Delhi and Hyderabad to meet the women who produce goods sold here.”

She volunteers at Greenheart Shop, one of two fair-trade stores in Chicago’s city limits, at 1911 W. Division St., where she arranges products and explains to new customers the fair-trade philosophy. The other city store is The Fair Trader at 1623 E. 55th St., in Hyde Park.

Fair trade is based on paying artisans — primarily women in developing countries — livable wages for their work, ensuring safe and honorable workplaces and selling their products at a “just” price.

Though the products often cost more than goods at discount or department stores, Gunasekaran says she budgets carefully so she can buy the responsibly crafted, environmentally friendly items that catch her eye — a $32 blanket made of recycled saris or $3-to-$5 packs of greeting cards, for example.

Despite the recession, sales of fair-trade products reached $1.2 billion in the United States in 2009, a 12 percent increase from 2008, according to the latest data available from Fair Trade USA. Sales of fair trade-certified foodstuffs at gourmet and grocery stores are growing at double-digit percentage rates, too, according to SPINS, a company that tracks such sales.

Chicago entrepreneur Megy Karydes, a 38-year-old Norwood Park resident, has leveraged social media to establish her fair-trade credentials and to expand her fair-trade jewelry sales to 200 retailers nationwide in 18 months.

She is planning to double her distribution again in 2012 through her company, World Shoppe LLC. Among her retail customers are the fair-trade stores in Chicago and the gift shops at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Cleveland Museum of Art.

Karydes keeps her retail prices lower than $100, so earrings sell for about $40, bracelets $50 to $60 and necklaces about $70 to $80.

“This isn’t an impulse buy for most people,” she said. “Many shoppers choose these as Mother’s Day gifts or for a best friend who is getting married.”

Karydes started selling fair-trade products online nearly eight years ago, but quickly realized that shoppers wanted more contemporary designs.

She reworked her strategy and traveled to South Africa to find what she considered a unique, more sophisticated look that would appeal to young, urban customers.

Karydes, who helps design the copper and brass jewelry she sources from an 18-person artisan group in South Africa’s Western Cape province, writes a daily blog that she tweets and posts on her Facebook page.

“The blog isn’t meant to generate sales. It shows customers that I have a pulse on what’s going on in the community,” said Karydes, who serves on the board of the Fair Trade Federation.

Much like organics labeling, the “fair trade” label is ambiguous enough that major companies often boast on products that fail to meet the required standards. The self-regulatory National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus has called on TransFair USA, which licenses Fair Trade seals, to make clearer what the term means.

That’s why Karydes is careful to tell her social-media followers about her fair-trade involvement and her ability to alert them to the latest issues facing the industry.

Karydes’ posts on Facebook, which include customer testimonials, new jewelry designs and photos of jewelry at retail, have garnered 10 to 15 percent of her customer base.

“It all has to work together and get people talking,” she said. “Retailers and shoppers may have cut back on their budgets, but they are looking for products that are new and that align with their values.”

Next year, she plans to create an iPad version of her digital catalog and put QR codes on her printed material, including catalogs and business cards.

Social media is about building relationships, said Mana Ionescu, president of Chicago consultancy LightspanDigital.

She advises small-business people to engage their customers in conversations, rather than broadcasting messages, and to find people with similar interests by using search.twitter.com or tools such as Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.

“Show your interest and seek out opportunities to help customers and followers,” Ionescu said.