Changent Paul Young

Guest post generously contributed by Changent Paul Young of Craft Village, UK, a Fair Trade Company that has started a unique project in Kenya. It has helped the locals increase their income significantly by selling hand-carved, fabulously crafted statues of various popular Simpsons characters!

Craft Village UK – a member of The World Fair Trade Organisation- have developed an acclaimed, income generating, animation inspired product series.

We launched our Kenyan ‘Simpsons Statues’ in February 2009 after 3 years of development working directly with stone carvers in Kenya. Our unique mix of Fair Trade and animation-art has received great reviews; from CNN, The BBC, The United Nations Development Programme, Sir Bob Geldof, Matt Groening and many happy customers!

Our debut stone product series is hand carved in Tabaka. Like many parts of Kenya, Tabaka suffers high levels of poverty and limited access to basic human needs: clean water; health care; education, sanitation, etc. By harnessing The Simpsons popularity, we are creating vital income for the area. This is trade, not handouts. We provide great products and service at a fair price!

This exciting collection has strong appeal to two specific markets; the growing Fair Trade market, and the massive ‘Simpsons’ collector’s market, -worldwide 60 million people watch The Simpsons each week. If we can sell just 1 statue to 0.01% of regular Simpsons viewers -it will provide 10 years work for our artisans!

Developing such a unique project has been a challenge, with many obstacles and false starts along the way. From product development issues, to obtaining a 20th Century Fox license, to packaging and branding problems, we have met each challenge with competence and confidence, and feel very excited about the impact Craft Village can achieve in Kenya, and elsewhere...

Our unique product concept is transferable to many animation and film properties. To date I have met with Licensor’s for Star Wars, Nickelodeon, Aardman Animations and 4Kids Entertainment, all have expressed interest in working with Craft Village to develop fair trade memorabilia for their brands.

It is Craft Village’s goal to become a genuine innovator within Fair Trade, and attract a new audience to the Fair Trade movement with our contemporary cartoon-inspired statues. We are proud to supply Simpsons’ fans with high quality animation art whilst simultaneously having a positive impact on many families in rural Kenya.

We recently launched our new website www.craftvillageuk.com which includes a retail platform and lots of images and videos of our producers in Kenya. All enquiries welcome! Contact Paul Young on paul@craftvillageuk.com