A shoulder bag in colourful striped cotton from Tibet was once an unofficial emblem of Trade Aid. You wore it, you symbolically nailed your ethics to the mast, at one with the Tibetan struggle.
“It was a Trade Aid signature product for years and years,” says Vi Cottrell, who founded Trade Aid with her husband, Richard, 50 years ago.
But the hippy-style hand-woven bag is long gone, and Trade Aid is now much more than just ethically produced Christmas decorations and woven baskets. The 24 shops around the country now generate only 25-30% of the annual turnover, long surpassed by coffee, tea and chocolate, wholesaled and sold in mainstream retailers.
This year, turnover reached $23 million, well up on 1989 when it made its first $1 million.
Trade Aid now supplies 20% of New Zealand’s non-instant coffee in supermarkets, cafes and other outlets (in many cases delivering fair trade green beans to local roasters who market them under their own labels). But chief executive Geoff White says wherever you see coffee labelled organic or fair trade, you’ll know Trade Aid has been a link in the supply chain. Over the past 12 months, it has imported 1800 tonnes of coffee.
The taxpaying charity is also the top organic chocolate supplier in the country, says White. It set up its own chocolate factory, Sweet Justice, in 2014, and supplies Trade Aid-branded chocolate to 178 Countdown supermarkets nationwide.
Diversifying further, it began supplying storage baskets to Briscoes last March for its online store, and “it’s going extremely well”, says White. Large companies sometimes struggle to meet demand for ethically made product, but with its historical relationships, Trade Aid has suppliers all over the world. It is now working on supplying other big retailers.
Markets for carpets
Trade Aid was the inspiration of the Christchurch-based Cottrells. Richard, a lawyer, was contracted to work with Tibetan refugees in northern India in 1970 (about 100,000 people had fled Tibet in the wake of China’s 1950s takeover). Vi found work sourcing foreign markets for the carpets and bags made by craftspeople in settlement camps. The goods were sold in Germany, the UK and the US. The Cottrells returned home after two years in India but planned to keep finding markets for the Tibetans’ work.
Initially, they assumed they would wholesale the products, once the all-important import licence was acquired (quite a rigmarole in those trade-protected times). Paperwork done, they imported $1000 worth of carpets, and those 15-20 rugs sold out in 10 minutes.
Next came the Tibetan bags, imported as strips of cloth woven on back-strap looms. The fabric was made into bags by what is now social enterprise employer Kilmarnock Enterprises, and sold in Beath’s Department Store in Christchurch.
Trade Aid was under way. Vi and supporters opened their first store – rent $2 a week – on Barbadoes St towards the end of 1973. Richard became chair of the board of the Trade Aid incorporated society, a role he held for 25 years.
Geoff White was appointed CEO in 2000. By then, Trade Aid’s growth had been static for close to a decade and his transformation of the business began with relocating underperforming stores to spots with higher foot traffic, and winnowing the number of outlets from an earlier peak of 35 shops. White put a paid manager into each store, which famously ran on volunteers, and began discussions with suppliers to change product lines to meet Kiwi tastes.
If you’re living in a village in Bangladesh, you have no way of knowing what might be on trend in New Zealand, so now Trade Aid sends lookbooks to trading partners who develop their products accordingly.
Trade Aid has 75 global partners which vary hugely in size – from TARA in Delhi, which facilitates 5000 artisans supplying jewellery, wooden boxes and other housewares, to small outfits with just 12 members.
Long retired, the Cottrells keep up ties with some of those early suppliers, such as CORR The Jute Works, which represents more than 4000 rural women artisans in Bangladesh. Hundreds of women and their families have benefited from Trade Aid, says Vi Cottrell. In the early days, they supplied macrame potholders and woven mats. Now, Kiwi homes want jute table mats and baskets. The flow-on from the commissions shows in children who gained an education, homes that have metal roofs rather than scorpion-riddled thatch, and in better nutrition. “It was a huge breakthrough for these women when the men began to allow them to make decisions for themselves and travel by bus to get their products to Dhakar,” she says. “They are truly inspirational.”
And the activism is still there. Trade Aid has campaigned for years for an end to slavery and White was pleased in July when work started on a law requiring more transparency around slavery and exploitation in supply chains.
While NZ has its own problems with worker exploitation, World Vision estimates NZ households unknowingly spent an average $77 a week in 2022 on goods from industries with products implicated in modern slavery. They include electronics, clothing, coffee, bananas and furniture linked to child and forced labour. It adds up to about $8 billion in “risky” goods.
Trade Aid’s values have attracted committed volunteers over the years. Activist Eva Rickard worked at its Raglan store about a decade after leading the 1978 protest over ancestral land taken for a military airfield during World War II and later being used for a golf course rather than returned to Māori. Former Green Party leader Rod Donald also did his turn, serving as general manager in the early 90s. Always with a gift for publicity, Donald had a suit made for himself of jute – a sleeveless jacket and shorts that no doubt chafed – and wore it in a 1991 campaign launch to promote jute over plastic shopping bags. He was joined in Cathedral Square, Christchurch, by Sir Edmund and Lady June Hillary, who were driven around in a rickshaw.
Tough times
After two or three years of the toughest conditions in White’s 21-year leadership, it’s time to take stock. The fallout of the pandemic has led to supply problems, escalating freight changes and a falling exchange rate that cost Trade Aid more than $1 million. The cost-of-living crisis has meant a downturn for all retailers selling non-essential products. On top of that, coffee-growers at high altitudes are struggling with the effects of climate change, with unseasonable weather sometimes wiping out crops.
“It’s their No 1 problem,” says White. “When their income is wiped out, they don’t have a backstop. There are no handouts, subsidies or pensions.”
Early next year, staff and board members will go on a retreat to consider what the next 50 years will look like for Trade Aid and whether its structure is fit for purpose. White, who retires at the end of this year, is fairly sure the shops will stay – they’re the front door of the business and remain an important part of educating consumers.
But the aim is always to have a bigger impact. “We’ve got to be as big as the problem is,” says White. “We want more people involved; that’s why we’re working with businesses like Briscoes. We need more people doing what we’re doing. Just us trading is a grain of sand on a beach in terms of impact.”
While fair trade remains just a fraction of global trade, New Zealanders can take heart from one of White’s statistics: Trade Aid sales in this country are double those of any other fair trade organisation in the world, by head of population. All developed countries have their equivalent of Trade Aid (Germany has seven), but in terms of sales, New Zealanders each spend more than US$4 a year on Trade Aid products. Elsewhere in the world, it’s just US$2.
Vi Cottrell says Trade Aid has gone beyond the couple’s wildest dreams, yet it has failed to live up to the ideal they originally hoped for. “We did think our [global] partners would eventually find a [wider] commercial market for their work.”
Certain suppliers of ceramics in Thailand and Vietnam have gone mainstream but for most suppliers, it hasn’t happened. “Most of them would not survive in the commercial market,” she says. “A lot of our groups work in very remote places where communication is difficult.
“The world should have moved on and trade should be fair, but that’s not how it is. But we’re still here and I personally think that’s a miracle.”