Car Trunks to Shipping Containers

Abstract

Fair trade, which has now made its way into the aisles of the retail giants in Europe and North America, started in a car trunk. While coffee is the commodity most famous for blazing the way for fair trade, it was, in fact, a latecomer. The first ‘fair trade’ product was lace from a Puerto Rican sewing circle, transported to Akron, Ohio, in Edna Ruth Byler’s car trunk in 1946 (Fair Trade Federation n.d.).¹ Mrs Byler was an active member of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a relief, service, and peace agency, and her car-trunk marketing of the products of impoverished Southern producers soon expanded to encompass wood carvings from Haiti and lace from Palestinian refugees. By 1968, this initiative had developed into the MCC’s SELFHELP crafts, which opened its first shop in 1972 (Ten Thousand Villages USA n.d.). Its descendents are the dozens of outlets of Ten Thousand Villages that dot the upper-scale shopping streets of North America (there are about 150 retail outlets in the United States and another 50 shops in Canada). Any one of these stores offers crafts from dozens of countries, and they sell about $17.5 million of handmade crafts in Canada and $25 million in the United States (Ten Thousand Villages Canada 2011; Ten Thousand Villages USA 2011).