From our friends in the East to your door in the West
Our story starts with my partner's Phil's travels in Bali when he was in his 20's. He was then a humble woodturner and became very interested in the abundance of wooden carvings for sale and the quality of the craftmanship. This was back in the dark ages, before the internet made selling online so easy. He decided to bring some carvings home to the UK to sell along with his wood turnings and found them to be very popular. He started going to Bali every year and over the last 20 years has became personal friends with the carvers and artists he buys from. Because this is a real friendship, he doesn't barter, he pays what he knows to be a really good price and often spontaneously offers to pay more, when he knows he can.
Skip ahead a few years, he met me and we started having baby girls and the pandemic hit. Although our own income was insecure, many of Phil's friends in Bali were really struggling, the tourist trade had impacted their sales significantly. I suggested we set up an online shop to sell more of the carvings, and other items, so that we could try and compensate for their loss of earnings as for many of them, without any trade there is no other way to secure any sort of income. A couple of his friends were relying on his business alone. We found this to be a better way to sell and recently ditched our shop for Etsy.
So you might ask, what is to stop one of them setting up a shop online and selling direct and making a larger profit? We asked the same question. The problem is that the majority of customers are in the West and the individual postage costs for each item would be so astronomically high, if posting from Bali, that people just wouldn't do it.
At Elfish Escapade, we cover the cost of shipping the items in bulk to the UK and we make sure that our friends make a decent living. For so long the West has profited from the East, we see Eastern Escapade as a small business trying to do things differently.
We should also point out that we only buy items that are made from fast growing and sustainable wood and some of our profits go back into reforestation projects in Bali.