2008 Woodie Awards
Shop owner brings fair trade to Newark
Courtney Bailey
Issue date: 10/23/07 Section: News
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When she opened her store in 2000, Boncelet said she wanted to educate people on fair trade. She gives tours and lectures to bring awareness to the subject.
"We have gone onto campus to do talks to the freshmen dorms last year because they have initiatives for education, and there have been many others as well such as church groups and women's groups," Boncelet said. "We just really want to educate."
She said fair trade involves artisans who receive a fair price for their work. They often have an advance on orders to pay for their raw materials. Through fair trade, consumers learn who made their products and know that their merchandise was produced under the proper environment in safe working conditions.
"Some people call it the triple-bottom line - people, profit and the environment," Boncelet said. "So to us, it's really important who is making it and making sure they get paid."
She said she does not go by designers to get her goods, but rather by country.
"Currently, there are 60 different countries the store does business with, mostly being villages and women's cooperatives," Boncelet said. "Each item in the store is marked as to which country it is from, in the store."
She said she only buys items from the Fair Trade Federation, which ensures the items are made according to the official fair trade criteria. For example, a women's group in Guatemala may have a catalog or Web site displaying its products. Boncelet would then discuss and go back and forth about the product with them.
"We care about who is getting paid," Boncelet said. "The producers are setting the prices [fairly] so that they can send their families to school, afford to eat and [pay for] housing. It's not about negotiating them for the cheapest price. I have actually gone back to producers and told them I was going to pay them more because I was going to sell it for more."
She said she has been a member of the Newark community for approximately 25 years and worked as a nuclear engineer at Delmarva Power, until she quit in 1999. Boncelet and her husband Charles, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the university, left the country on a sabbatical before opening Village Imports.
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