Women string together a livelihood

Ohioans work with women in Colombia on beaded-strap enterprise

Monday, September 11, 2006

Connie Mabin

ASSOCIATED PRESS

AKRON — The tiny beads look delicate: shades of pale pink, blue and green hand-strung and sewn together to form dainty straps for lingerie.

But they’re stronger than they appear, much like the women who spend hours hand making them in South America for Strappity-do-da. The fledgling business is a labor of love started by an Ohio woman desperate to help her husband’s family get out of poverty in Colombia, a developing nation with a bloody, violent history marked by drug running and guerrillas.

From her home in Bath Township, Shelli Styles has joined a growing number of entrepreneurs with a purpose beyond profit.

Starbucks buys only fair-trade coffee to ensure producers get adequate pay; and supermarket chain Giant Eagle sells herbal teas marketed by a company that sends money back to its African producers. A number of Web sites sell socially conscious goods, from chocolate made with rain-forest-grown cocoa to hot sauce made in Tibet whose sale benefits poor children in the Himalayas.

Styles’ mission is more personal: She seeks to educate and empower the struggling women in her husband’s homeland.

"The whole reason that we’re doing this is to build the women up, starting in this one little community and to grow that out," she said.

The operation began last summer, when Styles asked her sister-in-law in Cali, Colombia, to help fix a fashion flub: bra straps that show under tank tops and other shoulder-baring shirts.

A master of beadwork, the woman took a half-hour to make two adjustable beaded straps that could be attached to a strapless bra with builtin tabs. The straps are meant to be shown.

Styles, 42, wore them on the flight home and was stopped several times by women who wanted to know where she bought them.

Styles had been haunted by Colombia’s poverty for years. In Cali, a city of 1.6 million, her sister-in-law’s home overlooked a river filled with sewage, garbage and rats.

But in the straps, Styles saw the chance to change things.

Steadily, Web and trade-show orders have grown. Styles’ husband, Octavio Gaviria, and an employee help pack $29.99 pairs into white boxes to fill Internet orders, and the straps sell in some high-end boutiques.

Each box has a tiny card that explains Styles’ mission, also explained on her Web site. She wraps the tale of her mission to help the family in every sales pitch, including online: "Their spirit lit a fire under me to find a way to help."

Now, Styles and partner Christine Kett are trying to get the attention of a large retailer.

Styles, a lifelong saleswoman of everything from orthopedic shoes to makeup, said the beaded straps are easy to sell because customers want to support her cause.

To protect her employees from would-be robbers, Styles won’t say A woman works on bra straps that will help her support herself in an impoverished area of the world. how much she pays them for their piecework. The operation, however, has grown from her sister-in-law, Janeth Gaviria Sanchez, to a staff of 20.

Styles and Kett said the company has improved the women’s lives. Gaviria Sanchez has moved into a new home and become the leader in the small building where the women form an assembly line.

"I feel really good because I’m one of the boss artisans," Gaviria Sanchez, 45, said in an e-mail.

The single mother is proud to be able to make her own living.

"The money I earn helps me help my family, and there are other benefits," she wrote.

Her 19-year-old daughter, Greydy Gaviria, works eight hours a day checking quality. She uses her money for personal expenses and to help her brothers.

She asks customers to care for their handmade straps "because we make them with a lot of love, and we love what we do."

Kett and Styles say that while money can be measured, the self-confidence the work creates cannot. The empowerment, they hope, will spread.

"Having that one woman do this, it creates the base. It’s for their families, it’s not just for her, and it just keeps going," Kett said. "It keeps going and keeps growing as more orders come in. We’re helping more and more families, one at a time."

For more information on Strappitydo-da, or to order from their Internet site, go to www.strappity.com.

Copyright © 2007, The Columbus Dispatch