Sharing Hearts

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Back in 2004, we considered ourselves too cool for hearts. I mean, love’s great and all, but really? Hearts??? We’re forward-thinking professional women who traded in hearts and ponies a long time ago for high heels and passports. Would anyone buy hearts?

As it turns out, EVERYONE buys hearts. You’d've thought we had the secret of all existence in our outstretched hands; buyers across the country began ordering our pretty little stone, glass and bone heart keepsakes by the thousands. The reports began to roll in about how a little basket full of hearts at their checkstand just made so many store employees and customers happy. Purportedly, shoppers could scarce resist the temptation to throw a few hearts in with their purchases. Love was still very much in style!

Lesson learned.

Over the years, our customers have shared some sweet ways they’ve put our little tokens of love to use. One couple on Vashon Island, Washington, ordered dozens of our blue and green recycled glass heart keepsakes for their beach wedding. After nuptials, guests were invited to search for “beach glass” hearts, which the couple had strewn about in the sand.

Another couple, both avid world travelers, uses a pair of our hand carved soapstone hearts in a sweet ritual. When at home together, the spouses’ hearts are nestled together in a special place in the home. When traveling, each spouse takes the heart of their loved one to display in their hotel room as a present reminder of the love that keeps their marriage warm. Upon their return home, the hearts are united back in their place of honor until the next trip.

Our most recent report of sharing hearts came from a Catholic school in California:

I Just have to write and share with you how the little Kenya soapstone hearts you sent us were such a blessing at our Mother/Daughter retreat on Sunday! You could feel the energy when each mother and daughter selected a heart from the basket……at the end of the retreat we had a concluding blessing of the hearts. They loved the hearts and the blessing!

So I wanted you to know how far-reaching your efforts go—from the heart of Africa to the hearts of the retreat participants!

Blessings all over you!
Sister Joann
Carondelet Catholic High School

Eight years into our exploration of heart keepsakes, we’re fully convinced that these sweet little tokens have a permanent place in our line. Every design mission we’re inspired to find one more way to embody the ideal of love in physical form, every year our customers find more ways to share love straight from heart of Africa with their friends and loved ones.

Rubbish Redemption

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In the West African nation of Senegal, artisans style out metal discards.

Cool, urban and offbeat are all words we can aptly use to describe the artisans and creations of Soweto Village in Dakar, Senegal. To get a feel for Soweto village, imagine yourself weaving through a maze of crowded streets in noisy Dakar, trying your best to employ the spotty French you wish you’d brushed up on before landing. After you finally admit to yourself that you’re completely lost, you unexpectedly come face-to-face with a hip young Senegalese man wearing patchwork pants, his beautifully manicured dreadlocks descending from under his matching tam. He smiles in welcome, and as you eyeball a melee of funky little recycled metal Volkswagen Beetles on a table behind him, you relax. Soweto Village has found you.

The artisans’ medium of choice are bottle caps and recycled aluminum and tin from boldly printed coffee, tomato, sardine, pop and beer cans, the discards of daily life that are always in ready supply in this frenetic West African destination. Vivid colors seem central to West African advertising, and the Arabic, French, English and even Wolof phrases decorating the metal cans add even more eye appeal and cultural distinction.

When Swahili Imports first sampled the creative vision of Mbeye and Jacque, the small workshop’s artisans were focusing mainly on sporty bicycle and motorbike sculptures, constructed to include realistic details and moving parts. Since the motorbikes instantly sold like hot cakes, we branched out together to create some more bestsellers. So far, so good.

To build on our escalating wheeled vehicle craze, we brought a Vespa-style scooter sculpture into the line. From the recycled rubber on the wheels (which really roll) to the plastic windshield cut from a clear jug, every piece of the scooter is recycled. Mod revivalists must be strolling about in stores everywhere, because the reception to these cool sculptures by professional buyers at swahiliwholesale.com has been overwhelmingly positive.

We love art for art’s sake, but nothing makes us happier than art with a purpose. That’s why we worked together with Soweto to create with this year’s storage collection, which includes an umbrella holder, two sizes of buckets (complete with bales) and three sizes of decorative display cans with handles. We designed the pieces fully expecting these visually intense home décor accessories to only appeal to the niche recycling-friendly audience, but there’s something about them that’s already capturing the imagination of shoppers across the board. They’ll be available at swahilimodern.com in 2012.

Recycling and a love for growing things often go hand in hand, so we created decorative watering cans for all the gardeners out there. We’ve found the largest to be a great starting point for a cool floral arrangement, and the smallest is diminutive enough to serve as a holiday ornament. Look for these unique items in 2012, also.

As we continue to develop our relationship with Soweto Village, we keep imagining more useful and purely decorative items we can style out of recycled metal to meet the demand for tastefully designed yet consciously constructed home décor. Keep an eye on swahilimodern.com for arriving recycled creations, and always feel free to share your ideas for rubbish redemption!



A New Approach: Bright Friday

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As some shoppers fixate on saving bucks, our eyes remain steadily fixed on saving futures.

Tomorrow will mark the 33rd Thanksgiving I will have celebrated as a human being of the American persuasion. I’ll turn my kitchen into a warm pocket of mingling sweet and savory aromas, I’ll see delight in my little boys’ faces when I grace the table with a traditional meal. I love the practice of taking a special day to savor family and friends and to count our blessings.

Yet in the midst of my preparations, I am feeling a residual sense of urgency for the holiday to hurry up and get out of the way. There’s something important on the horizon, Darla, the advertisements tell me. Something you should not miss, Darla. Apparently, since I am an American, a trembling desire for this pending event should be hard-wired into my DNA.

BLACK FRIDAY looms like a malevolent cloud.

I was not always so blessed to work at Swahili Imports. For a few years during college, I manned the photo department in my local Wal-Mart. I remember the frenetic nature of the day after Thanksgiving: strife amok, shoppers trampled, fistfights breaking out over cheap electronics, being admonished to push high-markup items—even with a discount those profits were still quite tasty to the corporation.

The crazed manner in which people filled their carts with sterile mass-produced objects, nicking names off their gifting lists with grim satisfaction, smudged the beauty of these two holidays. Black Friday seemed like a road with no scenery that zipped shoppers from Thanksgiving to Christmas, quickly, inexpensively and in my personal opinion, rather thoughtlessly.

I am very thankful to have joined the staff of Swahili Imports a month after I moved from Missouri to Oregon ten years ago. Something about the handmade items coming from Africa resonated deep within my spirit. A decade into this very non-traditional era of my life, I know quite well what that something is, and what it means not only to me, but also to the world at large.

Every Swahili product is imagined, crafted, quality checked, packaged and couriered by people. Every person who touches our items benefits from those items’ existence in the world, not only fiscally, but also deep in our psyches, in that place where we measure and guard our humanity.

The artisans who craft fair trade gifts earn equitable wages that provide for balanced diets, education for children and future stability for families and communities. To a growing sphere of shoppers, the implied net value of an item that begins its life bringing good to another human being is great. Add to that value the affirmation of human talent evident in the artistry of handcrafted gifts, and tack on the harmony promoted between our cultures, as well. When one takes time to measure the overall value of fair trade gifts to our basic humanity, mass-produced, factory-originated products bought and sold inexpensively begin to feel…well…cheap, and sadly impersonal.

After 16 years of diligent product development work in Africa, Swahili Imports continues to see a growing demand for handcrafted African gifts, even though fair trade items will never be price-competitive with mass-produced items. We attribute this demand to a growing desire for a greater human net impact of dollars spent, as well as a departure from mindless gift gluttony.

Even a small item with great human net impact shows your recipient that you’ve given their value to you a lot more thought than a mad dash through a superstore on Black Friday might allow. You treasure your loved ones, you value the future of humanity and you put your dollars to work in a positive way. Not every gift can be fair trade, but when fair trade gifts are appropriate to your recipient, they are a highly beneficial choice.

Here at Swahili Imports, we’re giving Black Friday the day off. For us, Friday, November 25 is Bright Friday, a day to extend the sentiment of the Thanksgiving holiday, to be thankful for our artisans, customers and the transforming power of the fair trade movement.

The Ironies of Zebra Print

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Proof of the timeless appeal of zebra print comes strolling down catwalks and popping up between catalog pages every year. From haute couture gowns to bedding to handbags to shoes, zebra print seems to be the go-to pattern to up the ante for dramatic effect.

At Swahili Imports, we’re never quite content to just see a beautiful object as a beautiful object, perhaps because so many traditional objects in Africa have an underlying meaning. We can’t seem to help but ponder on ironies and implications once the contemporary objects that we dream up with our artisans become realities. At the top of mind today are our new Mudcloth Zebra Print textiles from Mali.

zebras in the veld

In nature, zebra stripes serve as a camouflage mechanism, preventing colorblind predators from differentiating the animal in the tall savanna grass. Zebras are very social animals, and no two zebras have the same stripe pattern (even though I must admit, they all look pretty similar to me, a non-zebra).

Now for the ironies. When adapted to the home or wardrobe, zebra print can hardly be considered camouflage. Instantly a focal point, zebra print pops among other colors and patterns, perhaps because the more plentiful photoreceptors in our eyes, called rods, cannot differentiate between colors, but easily discern black and white in both dim and bright lighting. In the savanna, you wear a zebra coat to hide and survive. In the human world, if you want something to stand up and be noticed, you give it a zebra coat.

Mudcloth Zebra Print Table Runner

Zebras may be social creatures, but the strength-in-numbers mentality does not translate when piecing together a room or wardrobe with zebra print. We’ve all seen the mesmerizing results of a head-to-toe zebra print outfit, or imagined the mental taxation of resting in a bedding ensemble completely patterned with stripes. To get the most appealing impact from zebra print without visually assaulting oncoming traffic, less is always more. A pair of zebra print shoes can set off a solid colored suit, but no shoes on Earth could pare down the damage done by a zebra print suit. With this in mind, we kept the number of, size of and distance between stripes on our new textile line in check, opting for an abstract representation rather than striving to squeeze as many stripes into the field as possible.

Mudcloth Zebra Print CoastersOur zebra print textiles have been well received so far, but we have been challenged by a few buyers to ensure that every piece look exactly as pictured on the website. Thankfully we can refer back to nature, reminding those fastidious souls that no zebra’s coat is the same as another’s…nor shall any of our Malian table runners be exactly the same as the one on the site. It’s Mother Nature’s rule, not ours.

To view our line of zebra print textiles, and other zebra items now available at swahilimodern.com, click here.