Art and Crafts From Ten Thousand VILLAGES (2/2)
A fair-trade company juggles ethical standards and current trends

Fair trade means fair prices
Coming up with fair prices is a complex process for Ten Thousand Villages, which helped found the International Fair Trade Association in 1989.

" We actually sit and work with them on it. We ask them how much the raw material costs, how long does it take to make, what does it takes to feed your family." Says Stacy Spivak, product designer for the company.

She has been an artisan group in the Philippines whose workshop flooded year after grow prosperous enough to put the building on stilts, and watched families who didn't have enough to eat go on to buy plots of ground, build houses, and send their children to school.

In one rural village in Bangladesh, where women weave jewelry and decorative objects out of palm fronds , years of steady sales to Ten Thousand Villages have boosted the number of weaving positions from seven to 65. New shops have opened nearby, further expanding the local economy, and profits have allowed the weavers to dig a well, which they share with the community.

Creative thinking
With a never-ending need for fresh items for the stores, what the market often requires is some creative tweaking of craft traditions. One group in Indonesia came up with a way of adapting traditional batik methods to create a vibrantly colored surface pattern on small wooden accent tables.

Another created wildly patterned , hand-painted mirrors and pillar-candle holders that have the look of a Gustav Klimt painting.

" We're much more focused on product development, and we're putting more of an effort into trend forecasting. We're also putting more energy into working with artisans and setting colors for collections and making the collections tell a story," Spivak says.

Vocabulary Focus

prosperous (adj) ---successful, usually because of earning a lot of money

tweak (v) ---to change slightly, especially in order to make more correct, effective or suitable

Specialized Terms

raw material (n phr) --- 原材料 any material, such as oil, cotton, or sugar, in its natural condition, before it has been processed for use