Here’s What We Do
It’s hard to explain what we do and why we do it. Here’s a book Natalie created about Haiti and the baskets.
- It’s really simple. There are three parties in this.
- (1) ProjectMedishare.org mostly selects the women we deal with.
- (2) We teach the women how to do handcraft items we think are sellable in the US.
- (3) Magically the stuff, baskets, dolls, whatever, gets out of Haiti to the US. Mostly tyo Miami. Last time the magic was to Los Angeles.
- (4) The really hard tough so-far-unresolved problem. How to sell all this stuff?
- (5) Marketing the baskets is our problem. What we really need is ideas how to sell these baskets. Production is not a problem. Sales is a huge problem. We have pretty much no clue how to sell these baskets.
We taught the women how to do handcraft items -baskets, dolls, whatever. In theory we do this: When a woman creates an item she gets (after quality control -after all it has to be sellable) about $2 per item. If we manage sell that item $20 she gets an additional $18. That’s what we want to do. Now in real life it all is somewhat different. The women do get personally paid for each item they create and that passes quality control at the time they deliver (i.e. within a month or so). We are still struggling in getting an individual sale of basket ABC being attributed to Woman ABC. If we fail at that, the proceeds of basket ABC get evenly distributed among the women.
We get no cut in any of this. So far we have not charged out flights or hotels or other expenses to ThingsHelpingHaiti (or anybody else). This is not a business for us. We want to develop this as a real business and turn all of this into Haitian hands. We have no idea of how to do this in real life.
Things Helping Haiti 