Half of Every Pattern Goes Home: An Economic Intervention

We will keep this one short, because the mechanism is simple. Half of the revenue from every digital pattern and flatweave we sell goes back to northern Afghanistan, to our own weaving families and to relief where it is needed most.

This is not a charitable gesture. It is a correction to an imbalanced trade.

The economics of the loom

To see why the model exists, it helps to see how the carpet trade usually works. Weaving is a major livelihood for Turkmen women in the northern provinces of Faryab, Jowzjan and Kunduz, but the industry is fragmented and hard on the people at the bottom of it. Weavers work long hours at piece rates, cut off from the market their work ends up in.

Middlemen run the trade, and the large majority of carpets made in Afghanistan are sent across the border to Pakistan to be washed, finished and exported under other labels. So the women who hold the ancestral knowledge and tie every knot keep the smallest share of the final value. That is the imbalance the model is built to address, the same one we describe in the only homeland you can carry.

The design is property

The patterns we archive are not abstract artwork. They are the work of real Ersari Turkmen families: the exact, engineered plans, the nakış, that survived wars, displacement and hard winters because the people who held them refused to let them go.

For generations those designs were copied freely by merchants, with nothing returning to the people who drew them. Selling the nakış directly treats the design as what it is, the property of the family that made it.

What the model does

Buying a pattern or a flatweave from us does three plain things:

• It pays the designers directly, for the work of drawing the cartoon, rather than paying a chain of brokers.
• It sends support home. Half of the revenue goes to the weaving families along the Amu Darya and to relief.
• It keeps the tradition alive. Every sale is a reason for the next generation to keep drawing and weaving.

That is the whole of it: keeping an old craft earning for the hands that practice it, and keeping the value of a tradition where it is made. If you would like to know more, or to help in other ways, please get in touch. You can also read our full story.

Sources

• Afghan Carpet Industry On The Up, Institute for War and Peace Reporting
• After fleeing violence in Afghanistan, carpet weaving provides a lifeline, Equal Times
• Afghanistan's women carpet weavers thrown an economic lifeline, UNHCR