When we tell you that we’ve hand picked every single basket in our stores. We mean that we have hand picked every basket in our stores. And when we say we in this instance, we mean the brilliant human on the right in the pictures above, our co-founder and original Basket Queen, Bee.
Each one of our colourful ‘Kiondo’ baskets are hand woven using traditional techniques by groups of weavers based in the rural Kenyan plains. A beautiful area blooming with baobab trees, cows and villages, all dotted around the impressive, flat topped mountain.
Women are the main breadwinners in this region and income from basket weaving helps support them during droughts when subsistence farming goes into decline. The area is also rife with poaching and charcoal burning - both a lucrative form of income in an area where jobs are very scarce. Creating alternative revenue streams such as basket weaving helps conservation by decreasing the need for these harmful practices.
The sale of our baskets encourages the craft of basket weaving to continue being handed down from generation to generation.
