Amara Indigenous Crafts Corporation

Amara is a socially conscious company that partners with indigenous communities across Central America with the mission of distributing their handcrafted products to high end markets. We focus on ethical, fair trade practices; cultural authenticity, and empowering local communities through our partnerships. 

Our customer base is divided into two segments: 

As our stores are located in the United States, we service affluent US consumers with luxury purchasing tastes mostly interested in Central American or indigenous cultures as a whole, or are focused on purchasing ethically produced indigenous crafts. Our customer base is also composed of our indigenous community partners. Our partners, spread across Central America, are artisans who make authentic, high quality products. 

Problem Domain:

Our current scale prevents us from creating truly sustainable, empowering partnerships with our indigenous craftspeople partners

We’re a brick and mortar retail company, but creates hard limits on sales due to the limited number of customers we can reach. Our direct purchase model of goods from our partners leads to deadstock issues and wasted, inefficient craftsmanship. This impedes our ability to support more artisans, but furthermore, our current approach creates a very niche customer base that is very interested in Central American or general indigenous culture or ethically produced indigenous crafts specifically. 

Opportunity:

Through interviews with our craftspeople, we’ve learned that they struggle with a few things:

• They want to maintain the “soul of their craft” : balancing the tradition of their culture while getting a stable income. 
• They struggle to get fair, sustainable compensation for their work. 
• They want to create higher margin, higher margin items for luxury buys so they do not have to produce the same cheap trinkets for visiting tourists. 

We, as a platform, need to sell more to support our indigenous community partners better. However, we also need to sell differently so they can streamline their offerings and have a more sustainable process of craftsmanship. 

Example customer case study

Gabriela Martinez is an indigenous artisan specializing in woven fabrics who sells small scarves and trinkets out of a tourist stand. The pieces she does sell are sold at a cheap price for a low margin, and she finds that selling larger pieces such as blankets that are integral to her culture are far more difficult – she wants to save up to send her daughters to college but currently is not making enough to do so. Through her community she is able to reach out and eventually partner with Amara, where she is able to create higher quality fabric products which stay true to both her existing skills and her culture. Her works are sold on Amara’s online platform, and with access to a global audience sells far more than she would be able to at her tourist stand. With Amara she receives both an increase in the amount and consistency of her revenue. She agrees with Amara on a payment amount that can best support her and her family, and is paid a portion of the payment upfront before the completion of each order. Amara also makes plans to order from her for many months moving forward, giving her time to plan out and produce each piece without stress. The increased revenue that Amara’s sales of her work brings her and her family an improved quality of living and helps to propel the prospects of future generations of her family.

Areas of uncertainty and exploration plans

Highest areas of uncertainty:

1. Are artisans willing to change the products that they create to increase their revenues and profits?
2. Are luxury brands looking to collaborate with or ethically source from indigenous artisans? 
3. Are consumers willing to spend more for authentically crafted products, and if so, by how much? 

Methods of exploration:

1. We plan on interviewing our artisans and seeing how they respond to changing the products they make – our preliminary research interviews have already indicated favorably but we will continue to communicate with them and ask questions. We will also showcase some examples of new product lines and gather feedback on their comfort in producing them
2. We will approach and initiate dialogues with a variety of luxury brands, proposing potential partnership deals. We will interview luxury designers, marketers, and others to understand their requirements for ethically sourced products, to gauge the overall interest in potential partnerships. 
3. We will use both our existing sales data and extensive market research to clearly define the spending patterns and price sensitivity of our target consumer base. We will also run small-scale A/B tests with different price points for similar products to assess customer response. 

Prior research

Our prior research showed that crafts marketplaces are common in the Western market (e.g., Etsy, Folksy, Amazon’s Handmade), but there exist no online platforms with a focus on Indigenous artists. Most marketplaces for Native crafts and art exist as small Brick-and-Mortar stores, but lack a mode of connection to the Western market.

This meant that our area of focus could be unique, but it also suggested that there might not be as strong of a demand for such a niche solution. We therefore needed to prioritize user research and need-finding to ensure that we were building in a space with sufficient demand.

To test whether our solution was in need at all, we first tested the following assumptions with over 25 users:

1. Consumers respond better to knowing the artists.
2. Consumers care whether artists are indigenous.
3. Consumers are willing to spend more for authenticity/ethically sourced goods
4. Luxury consumers care about where the materials come from? (not quality but source).

Partnerships Needed to Make this Reality

Craftsmen:
More craftspeople are recruited as demand increases when existing artisan partners indicate reaching capacity. We tie contracts with the artisans based on the following fair trade principles, with the aim of providing as much support as possible: fair Compensation amid economic changes, advance payment on orders: Safeguarding Artisans from Exploitative Loans.

Luxury Brands:
We are heavily dependent on partnerships with luxury brands to benefit from their reach and access to luxury consumers of the Western market. Our craftsmen and artisans supply the fabric and source material for products sold by luxury brands to their own customers.

Leading signals:

The success of our launch can be signaled through the following metrics being high: Revenue (especially compared to revenue pre-launch, with at least around 20% coming from returning customers), website traffic, and average session duration (> 53 seconds; tests the attraction of the website design), as well as the (average) total orders (per day, overall, on launch day, new products Vs. old products), in addition to organic traffic to indicate the efficacy of our SEO strategy. At the same time, a low bounce rate (<40%) is a good sign of attractive design

Other options

Open marketplace: One option was turning Amara into an online open marketplace, as it reduces our loss risks significantly (deadstock) and widens our product offering and artisans as well as putting a lot of service expenses off our shoulders. However, this prevents us from maintaining control over our brand image and user experience. By moderating our providers, craftspeople, customer service, etc., Amara can have a hands-on approach to quality assurance, ensuring that all products or services align closely with the brand’s standards. 

Product expansion: One of the main reasons we struggled with scalability, is because artisans can only make a certain amount of products. One option was making products referring to the indigenous diaspora industrially which allows bigger production amounts. But that goes against our whole identity as a brand that we are trying to maintain.

Time Frame: 

• In 1-3 weeks, we would like to have completed tests of all our assumptions to get a clear picture of a product streamlining that works for both our artisans and our consumers. Tests would also finalize the value propositions we convey on our new website 
• In 1-3 months, we would like to begin production of our streamlined product line and launch our basic website landing page teaser. 
• In 1-3 quarters, we will launch a marketing campaign consisting of opening pop-up showrooms in key markets and growing our social media presence. We will also launch our website with streamlined product offerings. In this time period, we will also pursue partnerships with luxury brands around our indigenous fabric and textile offerings.