Arosewood, hand-carved tic-tac-toe set produced by a fair trade organization in India that prioritizes working with women. A lucky seed bracelet made by an artisan collective in Uganda, where work can be difficult to find and extractive companies threaten the Mabira Forest. A mortar and pestle made by a family-owned Palestinian cooperative in Bethlehem living under occupation, facing severe obstacles around international trade.
These aren’t the instinctual corporate gifts that many workers might receive from their employers each year like bags, sweaters, or water bottles. But shifting public awareness around environmental justice and labor rights has created a need for companies to think more critically about where they’re sourcing their gifts and what values those choices reflect.
Ethik, a Utah company launched just before the start of the pandemic in 2019, commissions and distributes these products and many more from around the world to companies as corporate gift options in an effort to support artisans across the Global South. The company’s goal is also to get workers in wealthier positions to learn about people and places that produce their goods in a way that’s empowering and not dehumanizing.
“People tell us this all the time, ‘I’m so sick of getting yet another Yeti tumbler,’” says founder Melissa Sevy. “People want to know, where did this come from, how is this sourced?”
Fast fashion and so-called “corporate gifting,” often referred to as “swag,” can be a major ethical issue in our hyper-globalized, mass-production economy. In a system built around cheaply made goods, appeasing workers with swag is often a knee-jerk reaction for companies across the globe.But fast fashion models, which are reliant on a system of exploitation to ensure costs are low and manufacturing is fast, are built into everything—even multi-billion-dollar global events. Amid many allegations of harmful labor and human rights practices, one critique of the World Cup teams in Doha, Qatar, last year was that the players were wearing shirts produced in a Thai factory where workers were severely underpaid. Soccer balls produced for the event, while highly lucrative for the companies manufacturing them in Pakistan, are made by workers who earn two dollars an hour and work six days per week.
The world’s most profitable enterprises, like FIFA—a nonprofit organization that earns billions in revenue from its television licensing deals, among many other things—are built in a way that leans into these systems of mass production rather than challenging them.
Slow Factory, an environmental and social justice nonprofit organization providing open education, gained a following online in recent years attacking this mentality. “We need a slower pace of life in general, because the speed in which we’re going is definitely aiding in the climate crisis,” fashion writer Aja Barber said in a talk hosted by the organization. “We are using up resources faster. And in general, I’m not really sure this instantaneousness is working for us.”Barber, author of the book “Consumed,” pointed out that fast-fashion design and manufacturing ethos have both been built around planned obsolescence to create consumption. That attitude of design started with cars in the 1920s, she said, and expanded to everything.
Céline Semaan, the founder of the organization, said in a separate talk that the “culture of disposability” is maintained by a need to create branding and is a product of colonial systems. Plastic waste and pollution, she said, are key aspects of mass production and will inevitably require landfills that alter the land. “A landfill is only possible when the land is colonized and used as either a resource of extraction or a resource of burying our future archaeological finds of our civilization,” she said.
With Ethik, Sevy has taken a different approach.
Ethik is structured as a benefit LLC, which means they prioritize benefits to society and the environment as much as profits. The difference is more in characterization with the state and doesn’t carry any tax differences, but it can indicate a company’s mission. Ethik is focused on sustainability and ethical sourcing, but the company’s approach is different from other startups in that its goal is more the success of its partners than making money.
“The meaningless swag is what’s filling up the landfill. People are just throwing it away, or it’s at Goodwill,” Sevy says. “We really work to create items that are functional and lasting.”
Ethik’s wholesale platform includes items like blankets, mugs, coffee, bags, and more. They also create curated gift boxes with themes like office or morning essentials
In 2009, Sevy got a job living in Uganda for a summer after completing graduate school at Brigham Young University, where she earned a degree in public health. She was working with a large nonprofit and led their intern program for college students, focusing on classes that taught disease prevention. While teaching classes that promoted hand-washing as a practice, Sevy began to understand that some in the area weren’t able to afford soap.
“We can’t even talk about this stuff until people have the ability to make money. People need jobs,” she says of her takeaway at the time.
That takeaway highlights a key change in the methodology of international development work. Through the growth of corporate philanthropy in the 1980s and 1990s, nonprofits large and small operating in the Global South have treated their clients with arrogance.
Massive aid infrastructures were built that provided basic needs, but in a limited way and without undoing the root causes of a given community’s economic challenges. This often meant applying western and capitalist ideals of how a community could be “improved” rather than focusing on frameworks like decolonization or reparations.
In reality, the lingering impacts from and ongoing colonization in places like Palestine, South America, India, and sub-Saharan Africa have forever changed the land and material circumstances facing communities there. While the narrative has been for decades that rich countries support poorer countries by sending them money and aid, the reality is that formerly colonized countries are to this day literally paying reparations to their colonizers—as Haiti has done to France and the US—and continue to spend far more money supporting rich countries than they receive through aid.Along with some colleagues, Sevy set up a nonprofit centered around the idea of selling handmade jewelry to buyers in the US, aiming to create work opportunities for people through the program. It was a side hustle alongside her primary work until she was able to work on the project in Uganda full-time in 2012. The program was featured in a “Today” show segment, but the nonprofit struggled to gain much traction financially.
“It came to a point where I was doing this full time but was making just a little living stipend, so I was doing tons of side jobs,” Sevy says.
The experience led her to try a different structure. By 2019, she’d decided to form Ethik as a benefit LLC that would sell bulk gifts to corporate clients, allowing for the most flexibility. She says nonprofit boards, a key aspect and requirement of that structure, can be very beneficial as an input structure in theory. But in collaborating with international artisans, she found nonprofit board members weren’t always aware of the challenges facing partners abroad.
“I personally have found it prohibitive to have a board,” she says. Board members would have purely financial expectations, she says, asking, “‘How much of my dollar goes to overhead?’ And I’m like, ‘Wrong question.’”Sevy realized that organizing as a for-profit in practice would shift the priorities from appeasing a board of nonprofit executives to the needs of suppliers. “We’ve been able to do more social good as a for-profit,” she says. “We’ve been able to harness this for good.”
The communities that Ethik works with are predominantly located in the Global South and are impacted by colonialism. This means they are subjected to a system that has historically pulled resources from them. Ethik’s approach requires participating in that system, a less radical remedy than the dismantling of capitalism favored by further-left political thinkers throughout the past few generations. Indigenous groups across the globe have a history of resisting capitalism and advocating for reparations instead.
Ethik, in theory, uses the existing capitalist infrastructure to flip the script. The company turns the existing mass production market into a tool that benefits the community typically being plundered. The approach has key benefits for the artisans, offering them access to wealthy corporations buying gifts for their employees.
When Ethik receives bulk orders, the onboarded companies and cooperatives they work with can often hire more people and spend more money within their community sourcing the materials. For Sevy, this puts Ethik’s partners on a level playing field with her company and their corporate clients.
“It’s not like us, elevated, giving down to these people. We’re buying these products because they’re beautiful,” Sevy says. “And that feels a lot more dignifying, that they’re not beneficiaries, they’re producers.”One other aspect of Ethik’s approach to build on this is to feature storytelling with products. The companies and artisans that craft Ethik goods are featured in videos and articles online and in printed materials that accompany the gifts. This way, the end recipient has context for why the gift is more meaningful than yet another water bottle. It also allows the artisan to tell their story in their own words to an international audience.
The upshot is that buyers from Ethik will hear these stories while getting otherwise routine gifts, Sevy says. They’ve also had a lot of return buyers.
Now, the company has created more than 100,000 products and is joining corporate swag platforms to increase its reach. At any one time, she says, Ethik might have 500 people in a particular region working with them.
“We can place the company as heroes; they’re not spending any extra money,” Sevy says of the corporate buyers. “It’s like this win-win-win situation that they’re getting a lot of good karma from their audience, and then the money is actually going into the hands of the people that created it.”