Hello! My name is Viola. As a child, I was immersed in retail and storytelling, a passion sparked by my mother’s textile business in Toronto, Canada. For 18 years, I watched her engage clients not just with products, but with narratives of craftsmanship that reflected deep cultural heritage and historical significance. She didn’t just sell fabrics; she shared the stories behind them—tales of craftsmanship, culture, and heritage—creating meaningful connections with her customers, taught me the power of connecting people to the origins of the goods they buy. My father, a retail draftsman before the era of CAD software, also played a significant role in shaping my future career. I often found myself in the living room, tracing the technical designs he brought home, with his tracing paper, not fully understanding the intricate infrastructure details but captivated by the precision and creativity involved. These early experiences, though subtle at the time, laid the foundation for my future in retail, nurturing a deep appreciation for both the artistry of design and the importance of storytelling in retail. Together, these influences have been instrumental in shaping my journey, blending technical expertise with a passion for heritage and craftsmanship.

In 2017, I took a trip to Ghana, where I engaged with 5 women basket-weaving artisans. We gathered as women to craft, and laugh, and did not let language barriers separate us. As time passed, each experience with these women and their families was buoyed by teachings about craftsmanship, and femininity and I found myself being woven back into my heritage through craftsmanship.

Woven Worldwide is a socially conscious brand, renowned for high-quality, eco-credentialed, handcrafted baskets for homes and interior spaces. Today our business model provides functional employment to 36 disenfranchised artisan families and smallholder farmers. Grandmothers, mothers, aunts, and daughters, foster and guarantee food security, access to healthcare, and a sense of well-being to their dependents.

The recent shift from weight-based rates to volume metric rates from a local air freight partner posed a staggering 436% increase in shipping costs, fundamentally altering the economics of air transport. This substantial hike makes it prohibitively expensive for us to rely on air freight and has threatened our profitability, operational viability, and the 36 artisan families we serve. This is where we need you! We have reconsidered our logistics strategy looking to sea freight as a more sustainable and cost-effective alternative. Sea freight, despite its longer transit times, offers the advantage of more stable pricing, enabling our e-commerce customers and trade clients to pre-order/maintain our products without incurring the crippling expenses associated with air freight’s new volumetric pricing model. This approach will not only safeguard our profit margins, have a lower carbon footprint, and also enhance our competitiveness in the market by offering cost-effective shipping products to our customer base, and will sustain existing and create new jobs in both Canada and Ghana, contributing to the local economy and enhancing community livelihoods​.

Successful results with our GoFundMe campaign will directly support the operational infrastructure needed to reduce volume-metric shipping times and costs, allowing us to serve our artisan families in Ghana, and our North American customer base, which makes up 90% of our business.

Please Help Us Weave a Sustainable Future for 36 Artisan Families