Kathryn Elsayed had no idea she would be opening her own business when she moved to Atlantic City from Boston, Mass., about 14 years ago. Her father had just passed away and she and her mother decided to head down to the Jersey shore.
“My mother honeymooned there,” she says, standing next to her husband of 10 years, Ashraf Elsayed, in their new store at the Noyes Arts Garage of Stockton College. Peering through the shaded glass windows onto a cold and empty Mississippi Avenue — the sun can be brutal as it descends each afternoon — Kathryn is proud to show off the store’s goods, which come directly (pretty much; more on that later) from skilled artists and artisans around the world.
Nor did Kathryn — or her husband, a transplant from Egypt — know that they would be opening up the city’s only fair-trade store, the recently opened Eco4u Boutique (431-0086; eco4ustore.com) at the new Arts Garage.
Kathryn laughs when she thinks back to first meeting her husband during the first week she was in Atlantic City. He was working at a food stand on the Boardwalk.
“He makes excellent French fries,” she adds.
“Once we got married, I asked him, ‘So, what do you want to do? I mean you had a decent job in Egypt.’ And he said, ‘I want to start my own business.’ And I said, ‘Well, what kind?’”
Eventually, Kathryn recalls, she asked Ashraf: “’Well, why don’t you do something good instead of being a Capitalist?’ Non-profits are good, so we started there and, unfortunately, the economy went really bad, but he never gave it up. He’s always wanted to run his own business; he’s got a masters in business administration.”
The 501-C3 non-profit enterprise the couple started, Womens Future Benefit, was created in 2007. The couple’s intent was to raise funds on a grass-roots level to travel to developing countries and purchase art directly from the artists to sell back in America. The economic downturn froze the Elsayeds’ dream and so instead of pursuing the non-profit, they began working with the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) to open up a fair-trade boutique in Atlantic City.
“The [non-profit] would have been different path,” says Kathryn, “but the economy hurt us. We couldn’t raise enough money to even get out of New Jersey probably.”
The Elsayeds worked with the CRDA for about three years, attending meetings, raising money (Ashraf cashed in his retirement funds) and working with the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), based in the Netherlands, to line up fair-trade vendors that work with artisans from around the world, making sure they get paid fairly for their works and offering them outlets to sell their wares, such as the Eco4u Boutique.
The shop shimmers with vibrant displays, mainly functional art pieces, decorating its shelves and tables. Pottery, paintings, silk scarves, baskets, carved wood items, jewelry, hand bags, recycled items such as a bowl made out of recycled magazines (from Vietnam) and a tray made out of an old beer bottle (from Chile), hand-woven rugs from India and animal figurines from Kenya are just some of the fair-trade items the shop carries, all with the official World Fair Trade Commission stamp and most with stories about the artist(s) who crafted the product and/or the fair-trade organization the artist works with.
Although the term “fair trade” can be a tricky one to articulate properly — because it is indeed complicated — basically what it means is that instead of buying something from a store where you have no idea where the item was made or the conditions of the laborers or artisans, with free-trade stores and products, there are regulations in place so that the money goes back to the artists so they can continue to make art and avoid such nightmare conditions as the sex-slave market. Equally, the artists — mainly from “developing countries” — do not have to choose between eating and applying their skills and talents to their art.
In tandem with these efforts, the artists get marketing and promotion for their hand-made wares.
“Fair trade is essentially the opposite of fair price,” says Kathryn. “It’s like the ethical version of Pier One,” one customer chimes in, while looking at the hand-woven wool rugs from India. A tag on each rug certifies that no child labor was used in the making of the product, which goes for everything in the boutique.
“Everything is also hand-crafted,” says Ashraf Elsayed, a native of Egypt and the quieter of the two. “It’s beautiful work.”
He adds: “Everything is decorative and [most of the items have] a practical use at home.”
Ashraf points to hand-carved wooden jewelry stands, eyeglass holders and baskets for food. There are also leather bookmarks in the shapes of animals, and hand-made journals from recycled paper, crafted by women in India who were saved from the country’s sex trade. Hand-made games such as checkers, puzzles and suduko are also for sale at the boutique, as well as organic soaps, teas and coffee.
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