2008 - The Year in Review

It's been a while since our last "real" post, for which I apologize. November and December are always hectic months, and this year has been especially so since we've had to work extra hard to combat the effects of the US economic recession.

This post will be brief, but I wanted to put something on our blog that's not an advertisement or promotion of some kind.

So much happened this year, it's almost hard to remember it all. Will, Kim, Jency, and I have been working so hard, it's been a whirlwind. Here are some of the more noteworthy achievements we've made this year:

• January/February -- Will and Kim went to Ecuador with their kids on the first ever World Next Door fair trade trip. They started new first-hand relationships with fair trade cooperatives there, and brought back lots of great stuff that was wildly popular over the summer. We've since placed another couple orders from Ecuador, and are excited to see how things develop with those relationships. Our hope is that momentum created by this excursion will build to the point where one day we're able to source all of our products directly from artisans overseas.
• May -- Nathan reached the pinnacle of achievement in all of human history when Jency married him on the 31st of this month. The entire future of all human achievements is downhill from here.
• June -- World Next Door participated in the first ever Riverbend Marketplace. We survived 9 days of 100 degree weather, a storm that destroyed our tent, and hundreds of gallons of spilled beer. Jency and Nathan were even offered a franchise guaranteeing a six-figure income by cutting custom-made vanity license plates! It was a true test of retail mettle and our devotion to our business, and we're proud to say World Next Door is stronger (and wiser) for it.
• Summer -- our average growth rate for the summer months this year was in the double-digits over last summer. Woohoo!
• August -- Will and Kim began operating in their new capacities at Calvin Donaldson Environmental Science Academy, an ailing magnet school in South Chattanooga. With Kim's background in curriculum and inner-city school development, and Will's ability to build relationships and mobilize the community, they're sure to make a big impact there over the coming months. Meanwhile Jency and Nathan continue to manage World Next Door full-time.
  
• September -- our new website launched, and since then our internet sales have increased several fold.
  
• September -- we opened up our second remote mini-store at Grace Episcopal Bookstore, which so far has enjoyed stunning success.
• October -- we opened up our third remote mini-store at Main & Mocha, which has also enjoyed slightly lower, but by no means less stunning, success.
  
• October -- we held our first ever fair-trade-awareness event at Main & Mocha in celebration of World Fair Trade Month.
• October/November -- We survived the worst months in retail in decades.
• December -- We defied the recession with a huge rally this month, trailing only slightly on the heels of December 2007. Our Christmas Open House set a store record for single day sales.
  

Overall, World Next Door grew by 5% during 2008. Not to shabby, considering official reports show the recession beginning in December of 2007. We did take a bit of a hit during the 4th quarter, which comes as no surprise -- October and November were the worst months in retail since the 1960s, according to the Wall Street Journal. We had a big rally in December however (we even set an all-time record for single day sales at our Christmas Open House), and finished 2008 on a high note.

The first thing we want to do is say a big THANK YOU, to you, our wonderful customers. With your support, we've generated six-figures' worth of support for the fair trade movement spread across dozens of developing countries. You've also kept us in business, which not only preserves our own livelihoods, but maintains something unique, interesting, and attractive in downtown Chattanooga. Our lives and our city are better off for the continued existence not only of our business, but all local small businesses here.

The second thing I'd like to do is qualify what all I've said about our sales growing for the year. Personally, I tend to have a negative reaction to companies touting their financial gains and profit margins, since what they usually mean is that their executive staff made away with millions more dollars in personal income than they did the previous year (that usually applies to corporate giants more than small businesses). But in our case, it means this: we were able to continue to pay down debt, pay our employees, pay our bills, and above all, generate lots of business for fair trade cooperatives overseas. When World Next Door grows, the foundations and organizations we support grow along with us. So when we say "Thanks for your business," we speak for thousands of farmers and artisans in the developing world.

Parking!

You can park for free at the old NuMinit Car Wash that's halfway down the block from our shop! Just tell the lot attendents, should they happen to be there, that you're shopping at World Next Door. They'll let up to 2 World Next Door customer vehicles park free at a time.

Because of the extra cost we've incurred to rent these spaces, we do ask that out of respect for us and for the Car Wash that you please pay their normal fee if you end up doing something other than shopping at World Next Door -- for instance, if you browse the shop for 3 minutes, and then go out to eat for 2 hours, it's best to go ahead and pay the $5 they ask to park there.

The NuMinit Car Wash is located on the 100 block of Market Street, in between our shop and Cheeburger Cheeburger. It's directly across the street from TGI Friday's.

Mero Jiwan Nepal Ma

Updates from E-Wray!

She's got a blog. Go to it, and read it, and try not to get too jealous that YOU'RE not volunteering in rural Nepal until July 2009.

http://ewray123.blogspot.com/

Here's a picture. Guess which person is named "Elizabeth."

And here she is with her host family:

We almost feel like we know a celebrity. Or, it's kind of like the feeling you get when you're into this really obscure band, and all of a sudden the band breaks into huge popularity, and then you can say, "I listened to them BEFORE they were cool," as if it somehow makes you cooler by association. We can say, "That's right, E-Wray worked part time with us over the summer as she was raising support to go to Nepal. In your face."

Not that E-Wray is the kind of person who would wish to be made much of. But we want to direct you, loyal blog readers, to her, so that she can direct you to the issues she's confronting in rural Nepal, which are a much bigger deal than any individual person, she or I or you or anyone.

As we wrote in our last email newsletter, E-Wray will be teaching English, health, life skills, hygiene, environmental sustainability, and more.

24:Redemption (yes, I watched TV)

I should begin with a confession: I am addicted to the TV show "24." Usually I resist such widely popular cultural phenomena (I still haven't read a Harry Potter book), but Jency had season 6 of 24 sent to us in our Netflix, and I found myself hooked from the first episode. We've since gone through seasons 1-3 on DVD.

Shocking, I know. But we've found it to be a nice escape from the stresses of day-to-day life. It's got lots of action, lots of political drama, and, believe it or not, lots of great thought-provoking ethical dilemmas. Plus each episode ends with a cliffhanger, and so you find yourself running to Blockbuster at 10:00 PM and spending five bucks that you didn't really need to spend, just so you can go to bed knowing how that little subplot gets resolved.

But enough justifying my addiction. Let's come to the point.

Last night Fox broadcast a 2-hour special "prequel" to the forthcoming 7th season (which will start in January of 2009). A couple years have passed since the end of the last season due to the Hollywood writers' strike, so you can imagine my excitement.

And, knowing that 24 is a popular entertainment program on a major media network, you can imagine my surprise when I saw that the episode is set in Africa (in a fictitious nation called Sangala), and that a central theme is the issue of child soldiers.

And you can imagine my further surprise when I found that the commercial breaks, mainly populated by expectable corporate giants like Hyundai and Sprint, were peppered with spots from Human Rights Watch and the UN showing statistics on things like child soldiers and malaria in Africa. Kiefer Sutherland, star and producer of 24, had an ad personally beseeching viewers to support anti-malarial measures like mosquito nets.

Could mainstream entertainment media have turned a corner?

Who knows. But it's good to see another example of Hollywood addressing important humanitarian crises that have been languishing unnoticed for decades. Here's my open request to Fox executives (not that they'll ever see this blog): partner with existing NGOs doing development work in Africa in order to leverage the potential impact of your 24 fan base. If enough Americans begin to care about what happens outside US borders, we can make a significant difference in the lives of Africans.

And thank you, Fox, for allowing your most popular program to be used as a platform to raise awareness.

Don't Forget the Little Guy

Yesterday (11/14/08) the Wall Street Journal published a front-page article headlined "Wal-Mart Defies Retail Slowdown."

Here is an excerpt:

"On Thursday, after a week of bad news from retailers such as Best Buy Co. and Starbucks Corp., Wal-Mart said earnings for the third quarter rose 9.8% while sales rose 7.5%. At stores open at least a year, sales rose 3%, twice as much as a year before, and far better than nearly every other U.S. retailer.
Behind the figures is a confluence of trends fueled by the downturn. As strapped consumers look for cheaper goods, and weaker retailers go out of business, Wal-Mart is using its unmatched economies of scale to drive down prices, undercut competitors and squeeze costs out of suppliers ever more dependent on the Bentonville, Ark., behemoth.
Indeed, the downturn is increasing Wal-Marts clout just as its dominance was being threatened by diminishing returns on its big-box expansion formula, more-selective consumers and a growing field of rivals. The company's size is now turning to its advantage: for every $1 spent in the last year on goods other than cars in the U.S., 8.2 cents went to a cashier at a Wal-Mart store or a Sam's Club, the company's membership warehouse chain, according to Michael Niemira, chief economist at the International Council of Shopping Centers."

This is not a post to complain about Wal-Mart, but rather one to encourage you reading this to try your best to continue supporting local businesses as we all try to navigate the uncertain economic future.

As consumers we have a tremendous amount of choice when deciding where to shop. How we make that decision as a society has a big impact on how our lives and cities look. I hope we all decide to enrich our lives and cities by directing our spending to local enterprise at a level sufficient to sustain local businesses through the current economic slump. Although there is a moderate 'premium' to buying local, I'm certain that, in the long run, the cost to our community of sustaining and maintaining a given local business is much, much lower than allowing it to fail and eventually start over.

Andrew Mwenda on African Aid

Andrew Mwenda is a journalist from Uganda who gave a brilliant talk before TED last September. I agree that his talk is, in his words, "like a miniskirt - short enough to arouse interest, but long enough to cover the subject."

Listen closely, he's got an accent.







His main point is that official aid to Africa should provide national governments with an incentive to focus investment among local entrepreneurs, as opposed to targeting primary health, education, and hunger. The idea is that the current aid arrangement entrenches a system of dependency among African governments and does little to really build wealth. If wealth is built through investing in entrepreneurship, an attitude of self-sufficiency will be created that will be infinitely more potent than continuing to pump dollars into government coffers.

As a bit of shameless self-promotion, that is precisely what fair trade does. We work with several organizations all over Africa that have developed successful businesses along the entrepreneurial model. The difference between what fair trade does and what Mwembe suggests is that fair trade's market exists overseas, whereas Mwembe supports the development of the local markets. But hey, we've got to start somewhere, and so far aid on the official level has yet to make much of a dent.

This would be a great excuse to write a letter to your congressman or senator. And while you're at it, ask them to pressure our city to lower sewage fees for downtown. This water bill is killing me!

Think Fair Chattanooga happened.

We were pleasantly surprised at the turnout. A teacher from David Brainerd HS made it an extra credit event for her environmental science class, which accounted for about half the room. But some people were actually there because of the flier and facebook.

Advertising events online and around town is a lot like throwing baseballs at a dunk tank in pitch (no pun intended) darkness. Looks like we hit the mark with this one.

It's encouraging. I think we'll be doing this some more. You know, when we have some free time to plan another one. Will and I were talking about the possibility of a film/book review series to take place during the spring school semester. Stay tuned.

I misspelled a five letter word...

...In a flyer that was distributed all over Chattanooga and the internet. And I'm the one who created it.

It would be one thing if the word were something like, "dystopia," but it wasn't. The word was "trade." As in, fair trade. The whole organizing principle of our business.

Apparently in Marketing, a good strategy is to turn negatives into positives. So to that end, I'd like to think of this limited-edition poster art as a collector's piece that is sure to appreciate in value significantly over the coming decades. Capture a little World Next Door history for yourself, and hang on to those fliers for our "fair tade awareness event" in the same safe you keep your most precious valuables.

Or, find out what "fair tade" is and spread awareness for it!

Robin Hood

This was an awe-inspiring event last year. Our very own E-Wray (that's Elizabeth Wray) spearheaded the effort last year, mobilizing the GPS student body to raise over $60,000 to fund the construction of a girls' school in rural Afghanistan.

It's happening again this year, and everybody seems to speculate that last year simply can't be matched. But public opinion won't stop things from moving forward. This year the fundraising will benefit the construction of an all-girls' charter school here in Chattanooga.

It's a weeklong festival on GPS' campus featuring all kinds of programming. We'll have several booths set up in the quadrangle selling fairly traded goods, and we'll be donating a large percentage of profit to the Robin Hood effort. E-Wray is consulting with Jency to get our part of the game together.

Technically Robin Hood is a GPS event, but anyone is welcome to come and support the intiative. It will take place Oct. 27-31.

Think Fair Chattanooga

October is Fair Trade Month. We're gonna do something about that.

We're teaming up with our friends at Main & Mocha to put on a small event. You want to read a marketing blurb? Thought you'd never ask...



Think Fair Chattanooga will be an evening of engaging Fair Trade with the eyes, mind, and taste buds.

Come in from the autumn chill for a hot cup of coffee brewed from fairly traded beans, and stay for a viewing of Buyer Be Fair: The Promise of Product Certification. This film takes the viewer around the globe to show how conscious consumers and businesses can use the market to promote social justice and environmental sustainability through product labeling.

World Next Door will produce the event to be hosted by Main & Mocha, located in the Carter Center at the corner of Main Street and Market Street in Chattanooga's Southside district.

What: Think Fair Chattanooga
When: 7:00 PM Thursday, October 23
Where: Main & Mocha, 1463 Market Street, Chattanooga, TN
Why: For the poor, for Chattanooga, and for free coffee and chocolate!