MOR E T H AN A HA N D B AG How Kate Spade New York’s social enterprise initiative is radically transforming an entire community BY VANESSA CHILDERS // Photos by Jeremy Stanley
Nestled in the foothills of Masoro, Rwanda — about a 45-minute drive from the capital, Kigali — sits Abahizi Rwanda, a handbag manufacturing facility that Kate Spade New York helped local artisans establish in 2012. The for-profit company was created to serve as the first handbag supplier for Kate Spade’s then-budding social enterprise initiative, On Purpose. Its mission? To create long-term sustainability and help transform the community by empowering and employing its primary agents of change: women. Abahizi employs over 250 people full time, 90 percent of whom are women, and provides them with benefits including health insurance for their whole families, paid maternity leave, sick days, vacation days, and bonuses. Seventy-two percent of artisans are parents, and 20 percent are single parents. Last year alone, Abahizi produced 32,000 On Purpose handbags in both the company’s mainline and outlet business. Built into each handbag’s production cost is a fee that covers a suite of life-skills training programs offered to all employees, who have shown a consistent increase in workplace, economic, psychological, and community empowerment, year over year. While On Purpose is one initiative inside the Kate Spade New York business, it has had an organization-wide impact — especially since the fashion brand’s
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acquisition by Tapestry, Inc. in July 2017 — further transforming the lives of the families of Masoro and other Kate Spade New York communities. We sat down with Kate Spade New York’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Mary Beech and Director of Social Impact Taryn Bird to learn more about the impetus for On Purpose, the program’s blended finance model, the ripple effect it has created within the community of Masoro, and what the future holds for Abahizi Rwanda. What was the impetus for Kate Spade’s On Purpose initiative? Mary Beech: From the early days, our company wanted to do something involving our product that could also do good for the world. We initially worked through a traditional public-private partnership with the organization Women for Women International. We sourced products from local female artisans from Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Our executives traveled to those regions, met the women who were working there, and began to see not only the impact we were having on these women and their lives but also the way that both our customers and our employees were responding — it was all positive. We saw what is now researched and proven:
