Winter Spoiler: Handmade with Heart
We are so proud to introduce a CAUSEBOX exclusive in our Winter Box. We collaborated with Tribe Alive and Erin Loechner of Design for Mankind to bring CAUSEBOX members a chic and elegant Winter scarf, handmade by the artisans of India. Read the full story below and get the scarf in this Winter’s box before it sells out!
This love story begins in Fort Worth, Texas, at the headquarters of Tribe Alive. Founder Carly Burson sifts through several oversized scarf samples, just arrived from India — all of them beautiful and unique in their own way, but none of them perfect for the partnership at hand. She wants to create something exclusive, something chic and minimal, but accessible. She calls on her friend Erin Loechner — designer, writer, stylist, (and all around amazing human) of Design for Mankind — and asks her to weigh in.
“Replace the olive with sharkskin gray. Add some creamy whisper white; remove the poppy red. Leave the navy blue just as it is. Tassels in blue and white. Love the stripes. Fray the edges.”
Fast-forward four months: that call to Erin for some nuanced design cues snowballed into a trip to India with the Tribe Alive team. She is now overseeing the project that she helped bring to life, and she’s getting an intimate look at the thriving relationships that Tribe Alive has developed with its artisans.
The scarf, which so recently was just an idea, is now providing fair trade wages and working conditions for 42 individuals in Jaipur and Panipat, and Erin and Carly have traveled across the world to take it all in.
The colors were chosen, but now the thread needs to be sourced. For something as specific and unique as the thread used for these scarves it can take weeks to source all of the material. After the thread is aggregated, it’s taken to the weaver’s house in Panipat, Haryana—where it is spun into spools, and eventually secured onto the foot looms that will be used to turn the thread into textiles. The foot looming itself is beautifully synchronized, an art performance of sorts. Later, after the tassels are individually prepared in Jaipur, Rajasthan, the textiles are finished, cut, sewn, and frayed, and then each tassel is hand-sewn, one-by-one, onto the scarves.
Still, the work is not over—tags need to be added. And like the rest of these scarves, the tags are meticulously crafted with purpose. Each tag tells the story of a collaboration between Erin’s Design for Mankind and Tribe Alive — and the tags have a story of their own. They are created from recycled clothes that would have otherwise ended up as landfill. The fabric is shredded into small pieces and turned into pulp—the pulp is laid upon screens, stacked, and flattened into thin sheets. After they’re removed from screens one by one, the sheets are hung to dry. When the sheets have dried, they are screen printed, individually cut, and finally, they are affixed to the scarves.
All of this for a scarf and a tag.
But isn’t that how it should be? This is a love story, after all. It’s a story about a company that loves and believes in people. A company that is passionate about the details—about providing safe jobs, sustainable income, and a chance for its artisans to determine their own futures. It is a story about building beautiful things together— about traveling to India to stand side by side with the artisans, to attend to all of the details. And you can tell; you can feel all of this. You can see all of the idiosyncratic details and human touches—but more importantly, you can feel the love and pride that was poured into each scarf—from foot loom to tassel to tag pulp.
Reserve your Winter CAUSEBOX today! → causebox.com
