Sustainable Fashion Challenges | Guatemala, how to reach Global Markets? Ethical Fashion Guatemala supports Sustainable Fashion Producers, similar to other groups, we have struggled for over 4 years to learn how to increase sales and support our Artisans to reach a global market for them.

Marketing for some has been a challenge. the cost of Facebook and Instagram ads produces results, however, for many the cost is prohibitive. Ethical has found Social Media Influencers’ work, great blog posts about our story, work and producers have increased our sales to a point of being sustainable in our marketing services.

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Sustainable Fashion Challenges includes dealing with competitors who claim to be Sustainable? Social Media has allowed anyone to make claims of Sustainable practices by offering clear proof by a clear Transparency policy.

This excerpt from an article about our work explains how others claiming sustainable work are not.

Imagine you’re a weaver or leather-worker in Guatemala. You labor intensely over a product — let’s say a bag featuring textiles unique to your heritage — and sell it to an American tourist for $35. It’s worth a good deal more, you think, but the American drives a hard bargain, and considering 65 percent of your nation lives below the poverty line, something is always better than nothing. You make the sale.

A few months later, you stumble across the bag you made selling online for nearly $300 on an American website that claims to be benefiting artisans like yourself. The website may feature a picture of yourself that you never gave the visiting tourist permission to take or use, or it may feature a picture of a weaver you’ve never met from another village.

It’s a maddening scenario, but unfortunately, one that’s extremely common for a group of skilled craftspeople whose work is in high demand on a global scale, but whose access and knowledge about how to create their own e-commerce avenues has been lacking.

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