Handcrafting Spotlight

Handcrafts such as weaving and embroidery provide livelihoods for artisans in rural areas across places such as Bangladesh and Nepal by acknowledging their traditional skills. These techniques are also better for the environment as they save a lot of energy in comparison to machine production.

Today, many long-established handcraft skills are dying out due to mechanisation. Fair Trade is helping thousands of artisans keep their craft tradition and their communities alive, considering it in the design process and paying them a fair wage for highly skilled labour.

If one of our designers is presented with two ways of creating something and one method requires more labour, then they will specify this method of production for the good of our environment and the producers.

The Fair Trade supply chain celebrates hand skills. Their added value creates unique products while sharing the benefits of trade with the largest number of people.

Hand Weaving

The traditional technique of hand-weaving is a skill passed down through generations. The fabric is woven on handlooms, which produce 7 to 12 metres of unique fabric per day.
Artisans collect farm-grown organic cotton and spin the fibre into yarns, which is then woven into cloth on a handloom and the final fabric is cut and tailored into a People Tree garment. The whole process is done by hand.

More than 10 million people make a living by hand-weaving in India and Bangladesh. It is the second-biggest employing industry after agriculture. Fabric woven by hand uses nine times more labour than that which has been produced by a power loom and provides more people with income.

Whenever we buy handcrafted garments, this is helping individuals and communities to build up a sustainable livelihood based on their capacities by ensuring the valuable traditional skills do not disappear.

Handlooms are powered by the person operating them, not by electricity. As they do not require energy, they don’t release any CO2 and are carbon neutral. The fabrics are woven from cotton fibres grown organically which helps to maintain a healthy environment.