Telling Stories for Entrepreneurs

Every entrepreneur has great stories behind their brand. Those stories are your key to connecting with the people you most want to reach. Great brand stories make your audience the hero and you the helpful guide. They motivate your customers to take action and join you in your mission. Let’s tell stories that are more than just selling products or services. Let’s tell stories that drive connection and create a difference in the world.

Theresa Bastrup Hesman combines clean Nordic design with beautiful colors, textures, and handicrafts from Nepal. Her company Resa Living provides a living wage to over fifty artisans. She employs local people skilled in artisanal crafts like sewing, knitting, weaving, metalwork, and fine jewelry.  With a focus on sustainability, she reuses vintage saris and re-imagines leather remnants. Learn more about Resa Living here. #whomademyclothes

The ANKA Coop is a social enterprise with a mission to empower 20,000 Syrian women refugees through the creation of fine carpets and traditional crafts. They currently employ 250 Syrian refugees in Turkey and provide ethical income for entire families. Their dream is to expand their mission to other refugee camps in Turkey and help more Syrian women. Learn more here. 

This video was used in their first kickstarter campaign. It was viewed 4,598 times during the 30 day campaign and helped The ANKA Coop raise over $100,000 surpassing their initial goal of $20,000. 

Abiya is a traditional farmer in Rwanda, but he aspires to be a successful entrepreneur in the mushroom business. He is just one of many farmers in a country where the government has focused an incredible amount of time and financial resources to increase entrepreneurship. Will Abiya succeed?

Just after the genocide, Rosamond Carr, an American woman, founded Imbabazi Orphanage to care for children. Her plantation -- the place where Carr's friend Dian Fossey often visited, where parts of the Sigourney Weaver film "Gorillas in the Mist" were shot, where acres of commercial flowers helped finance Carr's simple life -- became home to hundreds of children over almost 20 years. The question today is, "Can a Rwandan orphanage become a tourist destination in a country where most visitors come to learn about the 1994 massacre or hang with mountain gorillas?

Nyamirambo Women’s Center (NWC), a Rwandan NGO, was launched at the end of 2007 by 18 Rwandese women living in the neighborhood of Nyamirambo in Kigali, Rwanda. Together they decided it was time to improve their lives. Today, NWC’s provides education and vocational training to women and offers free classes in literacy, English, basic computer skills, handicrafts and sewing. They have a beautiful product line called “Umutima” which means heart in Kinyarwanda. The Umutima brand trains and employs over 50 women from the community to create a large variety of women’s accessories, children’s clothing, and home decor products. This is a unique, self-sustaining model where the profits earned through Umutima are used to fund NWC initiatives, in addition to providing benefits and a fair wage to the seamstresses. NWC also runs walking tours in the neighborhood of Nyamirambo that give personal insight into everyday life and local social culture. A small community library was also created near NWC.The idea behind the library is to encourage reading among the youth in Rwanda and to promote the idea of “one child, one book” in a country where many children do not have the opportunity to read and discover the world through books.

Theresa Bastrup Hesman combines clean Nordic design with beautiful colors, textures, and handicrafts from Nepal. Her company Resa Living provides a living wage to over fifty artisans. She employs local people skilled in artisanal crafts like sewing, knitting, weaving, metalwork, and fine jewelry.  With a focus on sustainability, she reuses vintage saris and re-imagines leather remnants. This images were used to showcase the 2018 product catalog. Learn more about Resa Living here. #whomademyclothes

One Mango Tree combines design and fair trade principles to create sustainable jobs for women artisans and producers in Gulu, Uganda. They recruit their seamstresses from the local community and many of the woman employed there are widows of conflict or come from vulnerable situations. This community of strong passionate women have created an internal support system for themselves through their work. Each women pays into a communal fund. This fund is distributed fairly to its members and allows individual women to build safe homes for their family and build a brighter future for their community through their talents and skills.