Pebble is a social enterprise that empowers women
Today, we’d like to introduce you to Samantha Morshed, the woman behind the Pebble brand and the founder of Hathay Bunano!
Hathay Bunano is a non-profit fair trade organization founded in 2004 to create jobs in rural communities of Bangladesh. I first learned about Hathay Bunano through Pebble when I was sourcing products for my eCommerce business selling gift items and curated gift boxes. I was initially drawn to their products because of the adorable designs, but when I learned about how they make their products, what materials they use, and the story behind their brand, I became more interested. So I ordered a small quantity of their baby rattles to test the quality, and each one was perfect.
As a visual artist and crafter, I am always on the lookout for handmade goods. If you’ve been around for a while, you probably know how much I adore handmade stuff, and I especially enjoy discovering handmade items that are so well-crafted that it’s hard to believe they were made by hand. And Pebble was just what I was looking for when putting together gift boxes for new parents.
The cuteness played a big part as well, but what was more important was that the unique story behind their brand gave each gift box its own special story, making each gift that much more meaningful.
Brand Story: Pebble & Hathay Bunano
All Pebble products are made by Hathay Bunano. Hathay Bunano is a non-profit fair trade organization based in Bangladesh. The mission of Hathay Bunano, which means “handmade or hand knit” in Bangla, is to create fairly paid, good quality, and flexible local employment for women in rural areas who face additional hurdles to access decent work in their own community.
To earn a living, these young women from rural areas would have to relocate to the city and work long hours in unsafe garment factories, spending the majority of their earnings on rent and food in unsanitary slums. Hathay Bunano wanted to change that, so we developed an innovative rural production model which was much-needed for disadvantaged rural communities.
We opened 30 low-overhead rural production centers and moved production tasks that require less skill but time-consuming to the villages. These rural production centers created opportunities for rural workers to find work within walking distance of their homes instead of being forced to relocate to the city. We didn’t stop there. Our innovative model provided highly flexible working hours to accommodate the cycles of the agricultural seasons as well as other family responsibilities. As a result, we were able to create jobs for thousands of young women whose economic opportunities are quite limited.
Hathay Bunano is innovative in two ways. First, it has scaled up a distributed rural artisanal production model that allows businesses to bring jobs to rural areas while also providing easier access to low-income families and workers with disabilities in a way that is commercially competitive in the global market. Second, it generates good jobs with a lot of flexibility that benefit individuals, families, and communities in many different ways.
We believe the Hathay Bunano model is important because it has the potential to improve both handicraft business models and production practices in the ready-made garment industry.
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