It’s National Fairtrade Fortnight – who knew?

I guess that most people get the idea of fairtrade and I would hope that given two equally desirable products, ethically, you would go for the fairtrade one.

In the past this hasn’t often been a realistic scenario. When we first started going to big trade shows looking for suppliers to the shop it was a challenge. For a start, even asking a company about its ethical or even environmental policy was likely to get you treated as thought you were a tree-hugging hippy and therefore utterly naive about ‘real’ business. Either that, or the salesperson stood there with a slack jaw, a bit of dribble hanging out and a confused expression. I have to say that we did suffer in a terribly dad-martyr kind of way. It would have been very easy to have augmented our antiques and vintage furniture with great looking accessories but they all seemed to come from companies without a whiff of concern about where or how it was produced.

Was there an alternative? I would like to say yes, but er...not really. A lot of fairtrade companies at the time were producing, sort of, well, stuff you wouldn’t really want. I think they were trying to sell products based on the fact that it was fair-trade, rather than they were goods you might actually like!
However, we persisted and started to build up a list of suppliers who were fairtrade and had great products. In fact our best selling mug is fair-trade and the nice thing is, people love them and want them before realising that it is also very wholesome.

The ongoing situation with fairtrade companies now is really looking up and I like to think small independent retailers (like ourselves!) helped to create a sustainable market and stimulate demand.
Still, fair-trade companies can be a pain in the a**e to deal with. We use a couple where you have to ‘order and forget’. The product may turn up in 2 weeks or 2 years. We once put a repeat order in for some brushes only to be told that the Indian villager making them had earned so much he had buggered off! I guess that’s a good thing?

Pragmatically, we can’t just stock fairtrade items because it doesn’t yet exist in the variety of products that we cover. Many companies either can’t afford or find the whole process of being officially certifies complicated. There are in fact some really good, caring, responsible companies out there that are not registered fairtrade. So the overall picture is not simply black or white.

Ultimately you will only buy what you want and I would like to think that increasingly what we chose to buy, from foreign companies, turns out to be fair trade.