This October marks the 10th Annual Fair Trade Month and is the perfect time to celebrate the global impact of Fair Trade. Join Green Mountain Coffee, Healthy Voyager, Heifer International, Honest Tea, Make a Stand Lemonade, Numi Tea, prAna, and FairTradeUSA on October 15th from 5-6pm PDT for a Twitter party about being fair. Just use the hashtag #BeFair to attend!

A twitter party?  What the...?  Until recently Global Village had a serviceable website, plain but attractive, difficult to update, static, no bells, no whistles...  We had a paper edition of our newsletter and then an email version of our newsletter.  Three years ago Facebook was a mystery, none of us twittered, and QR codes were "All Geek to us." 

Now it's #hashtag this and #hashtag that!  And there's Pinterest...  This is a recent Facebook picture from one of our suppliers Mata Traders.  No, let me rephrase that.  This is a image from the Mata Traders blog post  "Pins of the Week"  with a link to their Pinterest page.  The picture was posted on their Facebook page. 

Oy!  No pressure for us!   How do we reach you in this hyper-stimulated, hyper-link world?  Are you on Facebook?  Have you 'liked" our Facebook page?  Do you receive our newsletter?  You can sign up on our Contact Page.

 Would you prefer to follow us on Pinterest?

What about Twitter?  Would you like to know about sales?  About events like the West Moss Avenue Sale or WorldFest?  And those weird, square QRC bar code thingies?  Would you like to scan an item in the store and see the story about the artisans who made it?  Would you use a code for printable coupon on our website?  Talk to us!  Tell us how to communicate with you!

October!  Cool, sun-drenched, saturated with color...  October is World Fair Trade Month.

This summer Global Village celebrated our 11th anniversary.  Fair Trade has grown exponentially in the last eleven years.  We began with ethnic craft items--timeless in their use of indigenous patterns and materials--and with coffee, tea, chocolates, books, posters, and greeting cards.  And most Fair Trade shops bought from the same handful of suppliers, so you could expect to see similar goods from store to store.

No longer!  Fair Trade has exploded:  if we had space, we could stock FT wedding gowns, soccer balls,  shoes and sandals, furniture, and drapes.  And that timeless quality of traditional crafts...?  Fair Trade non-profit organizations now employ designers who work with the artisan cooperatives to create products for Western markets.  We get announcements about the new Pantone colors for the coming season:  emerald is "in" for this fall.  --or is emerald "in" for next spring?  We are already seeing teasers for the 2014 collections.

Fair Trade has become "fashionable."  Fair Trade clothes have even gone High Fashion.  And "fashion" moves at a fast pace. Whether we are talking about clothes, accessories, or home decor, we feel the pressure to market like the chain stores--to put out the new stock,  close out the new stock (at low, low prices), and put out the newer new stock.  And that's good, right?  We want to grow the industry!

Yes, but...  In the rush it's easy, sometimes, to forget that our real mission is "Buy Fair, Be Fair."