Ethically Sourced Products | Ethical Fashion Guatemala

Guatemalan Artisans Are Going After 64,000+ Etsy Products for Copyright Infringement

Imagine you’re a weaver or leather-worker in Guatemala. You labor intensely over a product — let’s say a bag featuring textiles unique to your heritage — and sell it to an American tourist for $35. It’s worth a good deal more, you think, but the American drives a hard bargain and considering 65 percent of your nation lives below the poverty line, something is always better than nothing. You take the sale.

A few months later, you stumble across the bag you made selling online for nearly $300 on an American website that claims to be benefitting artisans like yourself. The website may feature a picture of yourself that you never gave the visiting tourist permission to take or use, or it may feature a picture of a weaver you’ve never met from another village.

It’s a maddening scenario, but unfortunately one that’s extremely common for a group of skilled craftspeople whose work is in high demand on a global scale, but whose access and knowledge about how to create their own e-commerce avenues has been lacking.

People do not buy goods and services.
They buy relations, stories, and magic.” Seth Godin

Meeting Artisans in their small shops and homes spent a day and learn about the magic.

Workshops create relationships for people, learn the craft and how the Mayan Culture plays into the design.

The magic is educating consumers about the quality products, produced by Guatemalan Artisans.

If you have Facebook, you can connect long after you have left Guatemala.

Originally published at https://ethicalfashionguatemala.com.