Online Commerce

There is a very interesting article from the Pictorial Gazette, Connecticut, (Via Groong), about small-scale online commerce.

Peter Kwasniewski, who together with his wife spent time in Armenia as Peace Corps volunteers.

Peter just launched Peter K Designs, an online business retailing designer belts and dog collars, which are hand-stitched by Armenian women from the village of Noembrayan, in the country's northeast corner. The unusual partnership was conceived after Peter and his wife Stephanie returned from a two-year stint in Armenia with the Peace Corps. It happened like this. While working with the villagers - Peter as a business consultant and Stephanie as an English teacher-trainer - they noticed that a number of women and girls were exceptionally skilled in the art of petit needlepoint and embroidery, which is similar to cross-stitching only the stitches are much smaller. The women would try to sell 6-by-11-inch embroidery designs - which took about 150 hours to make - to foreign merchants who occasionally traveled through the village looking for craft items. If the women were lucky, they'd get $4 for each item. Sometimes the merchants would just take the work, promising to pay later but would never return.

Peter has launched a his site, http://www.peterkdesigns.com/.

Peter mentions in the article about the good work ethic of the women, but says that the culture makes many of the available jobs unacceptable for men, who sit around the village all day or play backgammon. It's certainly a very common site in most rural (and not so rural) Armenian towns and villages.

Posted by Matt on June 30, 2004 | TrackBack | Email to a friend