When Siddharth Sanghvi arrived at Colorado College more than a decade ago, some may have seen him as the standard-issue freshman idealist, hoping to find a path that would allow him "to do some good in the world."
How was he different?
Just walk down one flight of stairs at his alma mater’s Worner Center and into the student bookstore.
There you will find a kiosk of fairtrade artisans’ goods — one of three brought to the Springs in recent months — that are marketed by a company that Sanghvi co-founded last year called World of Good.
Sanghvi, 30, said he thought his contribution in life was to come through biology and conservation. Instead he has turned to a mix of commerce and social consciousness, creating the Berkeley, Calif., company with a friend from the Uni- versity of California business school, Priya Haji, and serving as its marketing director.
The fair-trade movement — started in Europe more than 40 years ago — is directed at providing a living wage, maintaining long-term contracts and improving working conditions for artisans and craftsmen in poor countries.
The concept has been gaining traction in North America in recent years with sales increasing from $100 million in 2000 to $251 million by 2003, according to the Fair Trade Federation.
“There are really two goals we are pursuing with this,” Sanghvi said. “The more we can sell, the more artisans we can help and the more we can return to their communities. And, two, we want to be creating awareness of the issues, get people educated to the point that the larger players (in the import industry) have to take notice.”
Toward that end, World of Good has created a nonprofit organization for promoting the goals of fair trade.
Operated by another CC graduate, Holly Harbour, the nonprofit arm is working to establish country-by-country standards for what constitutes “fair".
“We were surprised that no one else was working on any sort of fair-price calculator,” Sanghvi said, “a means to compare daily wages and costs in various parts of the world. How do you determine what is fair to a worker in rural Ghana or in urban India? You have to figure how long it took to do the work, how much the workers had to pay for materials. You have to create some sort of metric.”
Sanghvi and Haji started 20 months ago working in a 500-square-foot studio and neither took a salary the first year, rolling over all the income into the nonprofit effort to get the word out.
World of Good started with just a handful of San Francisco area stores in February 2004 and now has more than 200 outlets nationwide, using a store-within-a-store model.
Since entering the Colorado market in September, World of Good has placed 31 kiosks around the state, including at the CC Book Store, Whole Foods and Vitamin Cottage in Colorado Springs. Stores get a 100 percent markup. World of Good sets its wholesale price by balancing what will provide a fair return to the artisan and will still be competitively priced.
There are more than 1,000 clothing, accessory and craft items in the catalog (www.worldofgood.com), mostly from Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, ranging in price from $5.95 to $69.95.
Each item carries a label describing where it was made and how the revenue from its sale benefits the communities of origin. The two best-selling items at the CC kiosk, $29.95 cotton scarves from Nepal and small embroidered purses from Guatemala for $34.95, are both funding schools in those countries.
“The students are excited by the gift items,” said CC Book Store manager Jenny Guy, “and also by the ideas behind them. Fair trade is an important issue here.”
You can also find the online article at the Colorado Springs Gazette website here http://www.gazette.com/display_search.php?id=1312201&table=story_archive&sec=4