Dominique Conseil, President of Aveda, chooses Hope For Women

I am excited to announce that Dominique Conseil, President of Aveda, has personally chosen to use our Portraits of El Salvador cards to communicate his congratulations to over 200 award winning Aveda salons.

Rosa - one of our Portraits of El Salvador cards

Aveda is a world-renowned creator of high performance botanically based beauty products, and is recognized as one of the leading socially responsible brands on the market. Our stylish, Fair Trade cards were a perfect fit for Aveda for meeting their high standards for design, function and social mission.

We are honored that Dominique and Aveda have chosen Hope For Women as a partner, and we are looking to work together with Aveda on other projects in 2009.

Recycle Caps with Aveda

Bring your caps to Aveda!

Through our partnership with Aveda, I became aware of an excellent recycling program that they have launched called Recycle Caps with Aveda.

Aveda found that a majority of plastic bottle caps do not get recycled today, and often these caps end up as litter or trash, ending up in landfills and beaches or migrating into our rivers and oceans causing harm to wildlife. Recycle Caps with Aveda helps you solve this problem - and it is super easy.

Collect and bring your RIGID plastic caps (if you can bend them, they are not rigid) to Aveda stores and salons so they can be sent by Aveda to be recycled into new caps and containers for Aveda products. What a great program!

Learn more at Recycle Caps with Aveda, and to see where your nearest Aveda Salon or store is located.

ISIS chooses Hope For Women to supply Fair Trade products

This Holiday Season you have the opportunity to take advantage of a special offer from ISIS, a premiere outdoor clothing company designed specifically for women.

Hope For Women and ISIS are working together on several projects, and we are thrilled to be partnering with a company that is 100% committed to supporting women in everything they do.

Customized tagua products from Colombia's rainforest

Through our new partnership with women artisans in Colombia, we are providing ISIS with customized Fair Trade products made from tagua - a sustainably harvested nut from the Colombian rainforest. The results are stunning, and we are working on new tagua products for ISIS for a variety of projects. Learn more about our tagua program by visiting our website.

ISIS is also featuring Hope For Women on their website, and will be featuring us in their Fall/Winter 2009 catalog.

ISIS provides 25% discount to friends of Hope For Women

To show how much they love working with Hope For Women, ISIS is extending a very generous offer to all Hope For Women newsletter subscribers. They are giving each of you their "friends and family" discount - so you can save 25% on any order you place just by entering the coupon code "Hope4Women" at checkout.

Take advantage of this great offer - it ends on 12/12/08. ISIS outdoor apparel makes the perfect gifts for the woman in your life, or for you! We are so happy to be working with them and for having such a wonderful partner.

Hope For Women in more Whole Foods Market stores

Recently we became an approved vendor for the Rocky Mountain Region of Whole Foods Market - the world's largest retailer of natural and organic foods. This is the fifth region of Whole Foods Market that we are proud to be working with.

Hope For Women greeting cards can now be found in many of the Rocky Mountain region's Whole Foods Market stores in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico and Utah, as well as in Whole Food Market stores in California, Arizona, Nevada, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.

We have formed very strong relationships with a diverse group of incredible retailers throughout the country who are supporting Fair Trade products. Hope For Women greeting cards are now available in over 650 stores in 48 states around the United States and Canada. Even in these sluggish times people are choosing to shop with their values - and fair trade products continue to make inroads into many traditional retail centers. Let's hope this trend continues.

The Fair Trade difference

In the last post I told you how we have partnered with a group of women artisans in El Salvador that are producing our new greeting card line, "Portraits of El Salvador".

While our goal is to always get a fantastic new product to our customers, our perpetual purpose is to provide income and economic stability to women artisan groups, which, in turn, helps the groups expand and grow so that there can be more meaningful jobs for a greater number of women.

Elana and Guadalupe - sisters, friends, artisans.

For the women in El Salvador, expanding their artisan group is risky. It takes considerable time and resources to train the women and if they do not have a market for the product their investment can be lost.

To take that strain off our new partners, we have put in place a program to engender mutual trust. To demonstrate our commitment and to provide security to the women we have produced 50,000 packaging units that have been delivered to their region to be filled with their creations. Currently, there are 12 trained artisans, and our packaging represents well over a year's worth of production. Our packaging commitment is the artisan's security that Hope For Women will be a long-term partner. We anticipate that the group will have the confidence to double in size by 2009, creating life-changing work for more women.

I had the privilege of visiting El Salvador, meeting each of the women artisans and spending time with them and their families at their homes. They are an inspiring group - you can learn more about them on our website.

Yanira and Roxhanna

Maria and her daughter Tonyia

New "Portraits of El Salvador" Initiative

Arte Comasagua artisans

We are thrilled to announce that Hope For Women is building upon our success in India by beginning a new partnership with women artisans in El Salvador.

For the past several months we have been building a relationship with Arte Comasagua, an artisan group located in the highland cloud forests of El Salvador.

Our new line "Portraits of El Salvador" - this is "Rosa"

In 2001, massive mud slides and a devastating earthquake left many families in the highlands of El Salvador homeless and jobless. With their fields destroyed, many people began traveling long hours to low-paying jobs in the capital. To better their lives, a group of enterprising women formed Arte Comasagua, an artisans’ organization that handcrafts stylish designs from native flowers and plants. These women now work locally, caring for their families and saving for their future.

Hope For Women is proud to work with this incredible group of women, and we are excited to launch our new line of greeting cards, "Portraits of El Salvador".

"Portraits of El Salvador" greeting cards have arrived, and are available at stores and on our website.

Learn more about this new initiative on our website.

Meet Elana - one of our new artisan partners

Hope For Women on TV

A wonderful news story about Hope For Women aired on TV stations across all 6 New England states recently.

After starting our production with 4 artisan women, Hope For Women is now working with nearly 50 women - creating stability and providing means for a better life.

Your continued enthusiasm and support makes Hope For Women a reality. Thank you!

Click here to view the story

Stability and security for more women

I am proud to share with you that Hope For Women is now working with over 30 artisan women in India, and that these women now have stable, sustainable jobs that they can count on for themselves and their families. When we started working in India we had only 4 women creating our handmade greeting cards. In just over a year the demand for their work has caused our working group to expand eightfold,
and more women are being trained each month.

Where do all the flowers come from?

Hope For Women flower gardenHope For Women greeting
cards are now available in almost 400 stores in 45 states across the United
States, as well as in Canada. Our growth has led to a big increase in demand
for the flowers and ferns we use and many people ask me, "Where do the flowers come from?" In the beginning we sustainably harvested flowers and ferns from the wild, but as the demand for more botanicals arose we planted gardens that would supply our needs. We have recently cultivated two more growing fields where we utilize organic farming practices. Our gardens also create employment opportunities for the gardeners and farmers we work with, many of which are family members of the Hope For Women artisans.