What Willa Knit

by Paige Churchman (New York City)

The first time I met Willa Shalit, she sat down at a conference table, put on some multi-colored cat-eye glasses and pulled out her knitting. While her fingers worked the yarn into rows, Willa listened, spewed out ideas, and spun others’ ideas into “yes-and-we-could”. I walked out of that room charged up, hopeful and ready for action. This was the early days of the Business Council for Peace, and we were both on the governing board.

Willa was not a businesswoman like the rest of us. She had been a sculptor who did life casts of Richard Nixon, four other US Presidents, the Dalai Lama, Sting, and Sophia Loren. Then came Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, and Willa became a theater producer. It grew from a fringe play performed in tiny downtown spaces to a global phenomenon with a wildly successful New York production, three North American tours, productions in 49 countries and an HBO film that she executive produced. V-Day events raised more than $50 million to fund women’s programs throughout the world.

Now Willa is the CEO/founder of Fair Winds Trading, which links artisans in places like Rwanda, Indonesia and Cambodia with the global marketplace. Willa had been to Rwanda on the Business Council for Peace’s very first mission. It changed her life. Having grown up hearing about the Holocaust, she knew something about genocide. But that wasn’t all. Like many of the Rwandan women, Willa had been raped. She was 15. He had a knife. Her connection with the Rwandan women was immediate and deep. “We understood each other,” she said.

When she formed this company, which now has a staff of six, she was torn between whether it should be a not-for-profit or an honest-to-god business. Finally, she opted for a business. It would put her on equal footing with her partners: the people who make the crafts on one side and the retailers on the other. “It doesn’t have a paternalistic feel to it,” she told me, “It doesn’t dry up. A successful business doesn’t leave. If it’s successful, it stays.”

“We believe in lasting partnerships,” she says, and indeed her relationships with her first partners, Gahala Links and Macy’s, are thriving. Gahala Links, a Rwandan business started by two sisters, produces the products (baskets mostly). Not as easy as it might sound. The weavers are mostly women who live over Rwanda in small villages. They can’t migrate to a city as the men do. So Gahala Links set up a training center in Kigali. When a new product order comes in, one master weaver from each region comes to the center. When she leaves three weeks later she knows exactly what has to be made and how to do it. When she goes home, she teaches her neighbors. “I couldn’t have thought of that,” says Willa. The women came up with a way that builds community.

Fair Winds Trading’s role is to make sure the artisans know what US customers want. It provides design research. What colors should the artisans be working with? What patterns, what shapes will appeal to the US customer in a year? Fair Winds Trading also works with design and retail partners to get the purchase orders right. Willa’s company happens to be working with one of the US’s biggest retailers─Macy’s. Last year, Macy’s sales of the Rwandan baskets reached $1.5 million, and seeing that it’s onto something big, the retailer recently launched a new program to encompass Willa’s new regions: Cambodia and Indonesia. It’s called Shop for a Better World.

Willa is forging partnerships with not-for profits as well. She’s tapped into the World Bank (for craft networks) and into foundations like The Waitt Family Foundation, which sponsored an African Rights study on the effects of women making money by weaving these baskets and The Kind World Foundation, which helped finance Gahala Links training center.