01
Livelihood & Fair Pay
Steady, year-round orders. Piece rates 1.6× the regional average. Paid monthly, not per-chair, not in arrears.
The longer story
Why we tied our factory to the villages.
The first chair we shipped to Marseille in 1994 was woven by a woman named Bà Lan, in her front room, on a loom her father built. We bought from her by the chair, like everyone else. We still know her. She is still weaving.
For twenty years that was the model — pay the weaver per chair, hope the loom runs next month, hope her daughter does not move to Saigon. By 2017 most of the daughters had moved to Saigon. The looms were going quiet. We did the maths and realised we had two options. Find a cheaper supply chain. Or commit, in writing, to long contracts and fair pay, and try to make staying in the village a real choice.
We picked the second one. Not out of charity — out of self-interest. The chair that goes to Copenhagen is woven by hand. If the hand goes, so does the chair. So we signed five-year supply agreements with the Phú Vinh weavers in 2018. Then with Bao La in 2019. Then with the rattan-grower cooperatives in the highlands. We made the books visible to anyone who asked.
Eight years on, three hundred and fifty people earn a living through this factory. Forty-two of their children are in school on a bursary we co-fund. Two villages have running water that did not before. None of this is a side-project. It is the supply chain. The factory does not work without it, and we are not interested in pretending otherwise.
