Village Ladies, Village Life

Nestled in the most beautiful remote regions of China, village life is built by women. Across mountains, rivers, forests, and plains, women are the weavers of culture and the backbone of economies. 

Farmers plough their fields with the help of their oxen. Sons climb trees and harvest yongberries. Fathers build homes brick by brick. Friends fish in the riverbanks. Mothers teach their daughters the delicate craft of textile embroidery from birth.

From Bai indigo-dyed batik to the Miao embroidery that acts as a written language, every tribe has an intangible cultural heritage. Textiles have the power to pass down whole histories and the deepest hopes of the generations before us. Our goal is not to commercialize these textiles. But rather to provide a platform for their beauty to shine. We hope to give the tribal communities a reason to keep doing what they’ve been doing for millennia. 

We are not the heroes of their story or the keepers of their salvation. We are simply partners and supporters in their movement to reclaim agency and sovereignty in the global economy. 

We work with village ladies and pay them a living wage because we believe they are the source of all life. By providing a platform to showcase their handiwork, connecting them with more buyers and business opportunities, and providing entrepreneurship and business management training, we hope to give them economic and social agency in the eventual form of a worker owned cooperative. 

Our end goal is to work ourselves into extinction, so that one day these tribes will have the full resource, training, and platform they need to thrive without us. 

It takes a village, but we are committed to keeping local culture alive.