So we searched for a local carpenter and asked him to make all our furniture to fill our new home. What we thought would be a simple business transaction morphed into a deep friendship. We soon began hanging out with him regularly, getting to know his wife and soon we were invited back to his village to meet the rest of his family. As our relationships deepened and our network began to grow and we
began to go deeper into culture, we quickly saw how talented so many of these individuals were, yet we saw that they rarely had an opportunity to use that talent and struggled to find ways to make a decent wage. We also quickly began to see and hear about needs that they expressed. Out of this relationship and experiences came the idea for KNOW INDO. We are a business that is about relationships and the needs of a community and individuals. We desire to bring you an amazing product and we are able to do that because of the relationships we have within local communities. Here is a glimpse at the process of how KNOW INDO works:
By spending time with locals and getting to know their everyday life, we are able to discover their talents and get to know their expressed needs. As we discover what those are, we then begin to work with local Artisans to craft a product using only their local resources: textiles, wood, etc. By working alongside the locals we are able to empower them in their talent, pay them fair wages and build deeper relationships within the village, which then opens up great access for us. We try to create a product that correlates with the communities need that we are trying to help with. For example, the first products we are making is Baby Items, because there is a great need for education in pre-natal and newborn care and a lack of basic necessities for new moms and families. Our hope is that through selling these products we can use some of the profit to provide an expectant mother with some pre-natal education and a baby box filled with basic needs for a newborn. The beautiful thing about the way this business is set up is it allows us freedom. Freedom to craft and bring you different products as we get to know more talented local artisans, it allows us to meet different needs through the sales of the different products and it gives us freedom to enter and discover new villages in unreached places. The possibilities are great and the impact is even greater. Our desire is to connect the artisan to the consumer in a more intimate way- to make it about the relationship-who crafted the item, how its impacting these individuals and communities and what their daily lives are like. We want to give life to the product, purpose to your purchase and a tangible way for you to impact these communities. We want you to KNOW INDO.
