Placemats made from Ethiopian silk, gloves of Peruvian alpaca wool, printed cotton shirts from Ghana. These products have one thing in common: they are made by hand by people, frequently women, and the work is paid fairly, which is anything but a matter of course in the globalised textile industry. Despite this, fair trade products are struggling on the European market and sales for the relevant companies are stagnating or even declining in some cases. Professor Johanna Michel from the Fashion Design degree programme and her research assistant Lina Pfeifer are countering this state of affairs with the “Fairfaktur” project. They are seeking to improve the profile of manufacturers and cooperatives in the Global South. The cooperation partner is the Alice Salomon UAS in Berlin. Dr. Philipp Kenel (ASH Berlin) and Liza Sander (HTW Berlin) contributed to the application. The project is funded by the Institute for Applied Research Berlin (IFAF Berlin).

“We asked a great many questions at the start of the project,” recalls Lina Pfeifer. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a set of guidelines for interviews with manufacturers and cooperatives in Peru, Bolivia, Nepal, Ethiopia, India, Bangladesh and Ghana. Organising virtual conversations was more time-consuming than anticipated. However, the personal exchange with founders, general managers and other company contacts was crucial. The qualitative interviews created the basis for further work on the project. The contacts were arranged by the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), a global network of fair trade organisations, and the practice partners “El Puente” and “Folkdays”, the latter of which has its headquarters and shop in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Both partners import and sell fairly produced handicrafts.

During the interviews, the project team asked about the organisations’ understanding of their own market positions and the challenges they face in terms of marketing, sales channels and product design. All of this information had to be gathered and, above all, understood before starting work in Berlin. The project aims to use needs-orientated research in order to avoid the phenomenon of cultural appropriation, which repeatedly makes negative headlines. “We don’t want to impose anything on the participants or possibly steal patterns and/or ideas,” says Lina Pfeifer emphatically. Instead, the aim is to determine the respective skills and needs and to provide helpful impulses based both on these, and on knowledge of the local market for which the products are manufactured. During the online interviews, the organisations in the Global South repeatedly emphasised one key question: who are potential fair trade consumers outside of the regular clientele? What makes this target group tick and which channels, product and visual language can be used to reach them?

And how is it possible to create aesthetically pleasing designs that are as timeless as possible? “A really important point,” says Prof. Johanna Michel, an expert in collection concepts. The research team is therefore working to support manufacturers and cooperatives in optimising their access to the market and attracting new customers.

The two-hour interviews, which were conducted in English, were documented and carefully transcribed. The recordings then served as a source of inspiration for collection projects by budding fashion designers in both the Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programmes. “The students told me that they learned so much as a result,” says a delighted Lina Pfeifer. Nevertheless, it was a great challenge for them to get involved in a completely different world when developing designs and prototypes. It is still unclear whether any of the prototypes produced will be manufactured. One or two appealing designs are definitely included.

Lina Pfeifer, for her part, has started working on toolkits. These are designed both to pool the knowledge gained in the course of the project, and also to provide useful knowledge beyond this. This is why this knowledge transfer is so important to her. She plans to use the toolkits in order to build sustainable bridges between manufacturers and cooperatives on the one hand and designers on the other. As a result, she has both target groups in mind when compiling the information. The former needs to learn more about market access, trend research and target group analysis, to name just a few examples of the key topics. The latter is invited to read up on the dos and don’ts of working with cooperatives as well as a wide range of artisanal production processes.  “Everything has to be as visual as possible so that language barriers don’t pose a problem,” says Lina Pfeifer. Both the WFTO and the practice partners will later make the toolkits available to interested parties.

Lina Pfeifer is very concerned that the “Fairfaktur” project is continued, and does not fall into oblivion. Not least because, during her own studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, where she studied Integrated Natural Resource Management, she dealt intensively with the consumption of natural resources such as water, soil and the climate. The young academic is convinced that sustainability must play a greater role in the fashion industry in the future and that fair trade products are a core aspect of this aim. She would like to see the School of Design and Culture continue to include “Fairfaktur” topics in its teaching syllabus.