Mata Traders is a fair trade fashion company, and we take both parts of that description very seriously. Our clothes and jewelry are manufactured by women’s cooperatives and artisan groups in developing countries that pay fair wages and provide safe working conditions. Our designs mix old-fashioned processes–such as hand loom weaving and hand block printing–with fashion-forward silhouettes and contemporary color palettes. Mata’s mission is to bring fair trade clothing to the forefront of the fashion industry–and to bring fashion to fair trade.
Ethical Fashion Blog
Sunita was an artisan, making jewelry by hand, with a horrible boss who would often pay her less than what she was owed or would delay payment or wouldn’t pay her at all. If she tried to contest, he would shoot her down with his “abusive manner of talking,” as she puts it. She dealt with it for a long time because she was poor and needed the money. She had no education and didn’t think she had any other options. Then, six years ago, she found out about our jewelry partner, a 40-year-old advocacy organization supporting artisans in their efforts to secure labor rights through fair trade.
Everywhere we went, we noticed women wearing colorful, embroidered outfits that had a long skirt and a hooded waist-length cape. Rather than a fashion craze, it was clear these outfits were designed to function as a modest cover-up worn in public. Who were these ladies? We asked a few times, only to be given the wrong information: they were Jain, they were Parsi. When we arrived at our new co-op in Maheshwar we were pleased to meet some of these ladies in person and find out their real identities. They are Dawoodi Bohra women, a community that is a subsect of Islam.
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Michelle, Maureen, and I first went to India in December 2003 and spent 4 months backpacking the country as part of a longer round-the-world adventure. We stayed in touch with our friends and family back home through a new communication technology known as the group email. On that trip, Maureen fell in love…with shopping in India. She started Mata Traders, and has returned every year since. We’ll be posting excerpts from past emails to share some of our first experiences and impressions of India.
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