Trade As One

Our first warehouse sale was so much fun, we decided to do it again. On Tuesday February 9th, we’ll be opening our doors to anyone who wants to make it a Fair Trade Valentine’s Day. In addition to our new Valentine’s Day products (which will also be up on the site soon), we’ll also have a closeout section full of great products at great prices. These events are a great chance to come in with friends and see our HQ, get some great deals, see products that aren’t available on the website, and hang out with the team.

In addition, this could be a great opportunity for some of you to gently (or not so gently) nudge your significant other to schedule some Valentine’s shopping time. It would be easy enough to forward along this post as a not-so-subtle hint.

So here are the specifics:

Date: Tuesday, February 9th
Times: 10am-2pm and 6pm-9pm
Address: 41829 Albrae St. Suite 102, Fremont, CA (Map here)

Hope to see you there!

Some days you get to work, and you can’t believe how effective you are, and it seems like you get a whole day’s work done before noon. Yesterday was not one of those days. We arrived at the warehouse at 7am to find a thin layer of water gracing the floor of parts of of our warehouse. Amazingly (and thanks to some foresight from Mike, who runs our warehouse), none of the products were damaged in any way. The only casualties were a few cardboard boxes.

So it quickly became a game of “who’s got the best idea for removing 70 gallons of water from our warehouse.” Everybody was involved, from Nathan, Stu, Mike, Leo, Kevin, our landlord, our neighbors..it was a family affair. We were bailing, sweeping, jury-rigging a shopvac to empty into a garbage can (didn’t work), and sump pumping it out. The best part was that the founders of Handmade Expressions, dear friends of ours, decided they would surprise us and stop by to see the warehouse for the first time.

All in all I’d say it made for a good Wednesday, and that it was fun to see everybody jump in with a smile to fix a problem.

We’re all back from San Antonio and thoroughly enjoying sub-100 degree temperatures back in California. Nathan George spent some time with Doug Robins, one of the teaching pastors at BRCC, and was interviewed about Trade as One and fair trade in each of their five services. The teaching for the weekend was from the book of James, and focused on the need to treat workers fairly.

Overall it was a fantastic weekend, where we got to connect with yet another amazing church in Texas, enjoyed San Antonio despite the heat, and created some desperately needed employment for our producers in the developing world. Today we’ve got an amazing team of volunteers here in the warehouse from Compassion Network helping us pack up all of the orders from the event. Now the real work begins!

A quick recap of things we learned at BRCC:

1. Texas LOVES fair trade (we already knew this, given our connections with BGCT, Woodlands, Ecclesia, Riverbend, FBC Austin, Wilshire, ChaseOaks, etc.)
2. Kelly Schuetz and her volunteer team are absolute stars
3. Shelton Green is one of our favorite people in the world
4. Olive Oil+ 105 degree heat= Corks unexpectedly shooting dozens of feet into the air. Awesome and kinda terrifying.
5. San Antonio is a really cool city
6. Bandera Road Community Church is an amazing community

Next event on the horizon is “Slavery No More” a justice night at Shepherd of the Hills in Porter Ranch, CA. We can’t wait.

This might not exactly qualify as breaking news, but I thought this picture of our COO Stuart Rentz was too good not to post. This is what happens when you decide to reorganize the warehouse shelving with the music on after a 12 hour day at the office. I guess we’re not the smartest guys in the world.

We’ve all been working hard to get everything in order before the craziness of the fall event season is upon us. We’re taking deliveries of products from all around the world and getting them ready for you to purchase at events and here on the site.

All of this was accelerated recently by the event we planned the last few weeks with Bandera Road Community Church in San Antonio (more information about that event coming tomorrow). They pulled together something really quickly and are using this weekend’s services to educate and equip their congregation to incorporate fair trade into their lives. Should be a great event at a great church. The one downside is that we California folks are a bit worried about the forecast. Triple digits!

We’ve begun our first round of interviews with our summer internship applicants, and we’re all pretty excited to get started. We never seem to suffer from a lack of things to do, so it will be great to get some interns in here to help.
So far the quality of the applicants has been superb, and the people we’re interviewing are both talented and passionate. And in light of their many talents, we’re not going to be giving them boring jobs (no one will be making copies or making coffee runs). We’ve got significant projects that will go a long way towards our success this year, and we’re going to trust our interns to run point.
Should be an amazing summer, as our team grows (albeit temporarily) in size and skills. Now if we could only get some A/C in here….