Poverty, economic opportunity, and fashion

Carly Burson & Priti Pugalia Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
From Evoke Media I'm Sabrina Mirage Naim. With me is Kassia Binkowski, and this is Breaking Glass, a series of conversations with women around the world who are shattering glass ceilings and challenging social norms. They are audacious, gutsy, and their stories are echoed across borders and generations in a rallying cry that is changing the narrative for women everywhere. We're having a really global conversation today with business partners Carly Burson, and Priti Pugalia. Carly is based in Texas and is the founder of ethical fashion brand, LAUDE the Label. Priti is the founder of Craft Boat, a recycled paper and textile manufacturing studio in Jaipur, India, deeply committed to encouraging sustainable Indian craftsmanship. Since its founding in 2015. Craft Boat has partnered with brands in the US, France and India, and now works with over 4,000 artisans on the ground LAUDE the Label, meanwhile, works with more than 500 artisans in Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, India and Peru, with the mission of creating real living wages for its workers and combating global poverty, an issue which disproportionately impacts women around the world.

Kassia Binkowski
Sabrina, collectively these women are working to disrupt the traditional fashion supply chain by producing timeless products while creating meaningful economic opportunities for thousands of women. We bounced all over the place in today's conversation, because these women are simply on fire. We're talking about the injustices of the orphan crisis around the world, the oppressive poverty that far too many women are living under, the immigration crisis here in the United States, and the ripple effect that a living wage can have on a woman's life. We are wildly impressed to see how Carly and Priti's work is touching each of these areas of impact in really meaningful ways. Take a listen.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Good morning, and good evening, Carly and Priti, you both are joining us from different parts of the world. But we're excited to have a conversation where you intersect with your work, with your passions. Carly joining us from Texas and Priti from Jaipur, India. Thank you both for being with us today.

Carly Burson
Thanks for having us.

Priti Pugalia
Thanks Sabrina.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So there are quite a few topics we want to touch on today. And to the extent that honestly, I don't even know how we'll get through this conversation in less than the time that we have. But we'll do our best. So we want to start with the story that you, Carly, have already shared publicly. But for the purposes of this conversation, given it's very relevant to our focus of women's issues, we'd be remiss not to ask you about it. Take us back to the adoption of your daughter. What originally drew you to adopt and what shifted for you after that experience.

Carly Burson
Yeah, you know, whenever I share the story of why I chose to start an ethical fashion brand, it always goes back to really the personal experience of adopting my first daughter Ellie. At the time, I was working in traditional fashion and had a job that I really viewed to be my dream career. Working for a company I never envisioned leaving. But when my husband and I were finalizing our daughter's adoption, she's from Ethiopia, we were spending a great deal of time in her home country. Her adoption process was fairly complicated, and it required us being in country for many months. So within that time, we spent a lot of time in the children's home that she grew up in, and witnessed visiting hours. I would say I really kind of, you know, everyone has an "aha moment", and for me, it was definitely witnessing birth parents coming to visit their children in an orphanage and recognizing and seeing how loved and wanted those children were, but they were not able to be home with their families because of poverty. And it just made me realize that adoption, though it's important, and there are many children that need homes, it's really just a band aid for a much bigger issue. Really the leading cause of child relinquishment is poverty. And I think in the Western world, we view it as war and death and other reasons that birth parents aren't able to raise their children even that parents maybe don't want their children and that's just not the reality of what the orphan crisis looks like. So once we adopted Ellie, I just felt like I needed to do something that would honor her birth mother, really recognizing that I was working in an industry that perpetuates poverty all over the world. Garment workers, it employs mostly all women, it's the leading industry for women worldwide. But it's an industry that holds women in poverty. And it's an industry that actually takes women away from their children. So I ended up leaving my fashion career and decided to start what is now LAUDE the Label. Really just wanting to be a part of keeping families together. Giving women the opportunity to take care of their children, giving women the opportunity to make their own choices, giving the women the opportunity to recognize that they're worthy of a paying job, and to work in a space where they're safe, and they're respected, and they're valued. And that they would have children at home, watching them go off to work every day, and recognizing that power and that worth within their mother. So, gosh, it was seven, eight years ago, it started out as a really small kind of side hustle where we employed five to six jewelry makers in Honduras. And in the last seven years, we've expanded into six countries and now employ over 536 artisans worldwide.

Sabrina Merage Naim
That's incredible. And I'm very excited to get into LAUDE the Label a little bit more in a minute. But I there's so much that I want to unpack with what you just said. And I think that it's important to acknowledge that what you're saying is right, about the misconception, maybe in Western countries, but I'm assuming also in other places that adoption exists. The idea of adoption exists because there are children out there who are orphans, or whose parents don't want them, or you know, all of these things. And the acknowledgment that that's not always the case, and that, in fact most of the time, that's not the case. And I'm curious just how for you personally, you were able to reconcile that period of your time where, being able to adopt Ellie, my assumption is that that was a highlight of your life, that she is a joy for you. But that it comes with such complicated baggage knowing that she or other children out there do have parents that otherwise would want them or would want to keep them and hold on to them. And because of the poverty that exists in this world, they don't have that choice, that they don't have that option. How were you able to personally navigate the complexities of those feelings of being on both sides of that understanding?

Carly Burson
Yeah, that's a really amazing, great question that I don't get asked often. I think the adoption community focuses too much on adoptive parents and the joy of bringing a child into your home. But I've always viewed it as, Ellie is one of the greatest gifts and greatest joys of my life. But what was my greatest gift was another woman's greatest tragedy. And I think that we have to really recognize that in adoption, it's definitely not something I've ever reconciled with. I think if there's a day where that makes sense to me, then I've sort of lost the magnitude of the issue. I have an older daughter, she's now 21. And you know, we're hearing a lot on the news right now about refugee children at our border fleeing from Latin American countries. And she was one of those kids that was held in a detention facility. She was only 15 years old, she was pregnant with her daughter, my now granddaughter. And I never not think about when we get to experience happy moments in our life, andd when I get to be a part of my granddaughter's birthday parties, and when I got to watch my daughter graduate from high school, and then graduate from a medical program and get her first job, I never stopped thinking about her mother back in Guatemala. And that it's such injustice that I'm the one that gets to be a part of all of these things when her wonderful mother in Guatemala that raised her, quite frankly, to be the incredible human that she is. If it weren't for poverty, if it weren't for systems of injustice, she would be experiencing all of these things alongside of her. So I think our family story is filled with a lot of joy and a lot of gratitude, but it started from a place of tragedy, and it started from a place of injustice. And we just don't ever forget it. We don't ever reconcile with it. For us, it's about trying to change it systematically for other families and other children and other mothers.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Priti I want to switch to you. You are in Jaipur, which is a city that I've actually been to and is this beautiful, colorful place. And it struck me when I was there that I was staying in this really beautiful extravagant hotel that was the last Maharaja 's hunting palace. And it was gorgeous, and every detail was tended to and everything was incredible. And then the moment that you would walk out of the gates, there was a huge dichotomy of how people were living outside of the walls of this beautiful image that was being portrayed to us tourists. And that was very challenging for me to see, and I was only there for a few days. I'm curious as to everything that Carly is talking about with her experience with women in Ethiopia, and her daughter from Guatemala, Priscilla, and so many of the women that she's dealing with around the world, can you speak specifically to the women in India? What do you see as the most pressing needs right now?

Priti Pugalia
I think you've touched the most sensitive chord of showing the two sides that you experienced here, because most of the people who visit India experience the two extreme sides of India. And it's remarkable how everything coexists in this country. I feel the biggest challenge that an Indian woman is right now facing, which in the young generation, I'm seeing this more and more, is the educated ones are the ones in the rural villages, I feel the subject which is currently a sense of emergency in the society is to find respect for women, which absolutely lacks in this country. And gender equality has been taken as a very different subject, and not really understood and talked about because women in general, are not respected. And that's something very, very basic, which is alarming. So the education on respect, as a value system, really lacks in the country as one of the most supreme things I feel women should be going through. Second very, very big subject that I'm sure a lot of women, educated and uneducated are going through and some of them don't even know much about it, is patriarchy. I feel it's one of the very, very core roots where it's good to follow the tradition and culture of a place. Because that's what makes you who you are, that that's what brings your identity. But when something comes to you forced, I feel patriarchy is a very big subject where women are suppressed in India. And they really don't know how to voice it, be educated or uneducated, urban, rural, wherever you belong to. So that's one of the core reasons why a lot of women feels oppressed in India.

Kassia Binkowski
What about your own personal story and your own trajectory into this work? How did you become involved? How did you end up founding Craft Boat? What can you tell us about when this became a deeply professional passion and not just something you were living in and experiencing personally?

Priti Pugalia
I was very naive when I really started it. I'll be honest on that, where it was more like I was a creative person. And I wanted to pursue something to do with product design, and something to do with Indian crafts. And since I belong to a textile background in my profession. So I wanted to recycle the material more because I was shocked with the competition that was going on to just create more and more new stuff. And by going through my education, I was constantly diving deep on how to recycle this material. And that's how Craft Boat was born, where I was recycling textile waste into handmade sheets of paper, which is a very old tradition and required some design intervention and understanding from that point of view. But as I went into it, I faced challenges myself, where I was trying to build a career from the level zero where nothing was really... In India, it's very traditional to have family businesses and joint family roots to be able to pick up your career if you're starting a business. It's, of course growing more and more, a lot of people are becoming entrepreneurs, but it's still a subject which is questioned and not really accepted, especially when you are a woman because everyone has a set rule in the society in India. If you are a woman, at 18 you're supposed to do this, at 22 you're supposed to do this, at 26 you're supposed to do this... and if you're not following that, then maybe you cross 18 and you're not questioned, you cross 22 and you're not questioned, but once in life you will be questioned. So you have to be prepared. And it happened to me when I was starting my career because, at Craft Boat a lot of people, and it's unfortunate and it's fortunate, but it's a situation in India that's still male-dominated, the business sector, and are supposed to be more enterprising than women. So I had to deal with that every day when they had a question that, if she's coming up with an inquiry, is she serious? Is she going to really bring business? So, no one took me seriously, and all they wanted out of me, is that, okay, I used to get opportunities like this all the time. Like, "okay, can you come and just join us and design for us"? You know, "why do you have to start your own business? Just do some part time thing, or just give your services to us", so no one was really taking me very seriously, because everyone had this thing that she will work for a year or two, and then she'll get married. So she has a life set, and she has to follow that path. You have to, at that point, you really did not know that... you know you have to answer back. What is the answer to be given back? Because when you are in a journey to perform, I think you wait for your actions to speak, because you really don't know what to speak.

Kassia Binkowski
So as a woman in India, faced with these cultural barriers, faced with the lack of entrepreneurial culture, especially support for women entrepreneurs, when did that change for you? Has it changed for you? When did you know what the right words were going to be to to answer when you were getting pushback? Or has it not?

Priti Pugalia
I think, no, it's not been an answer yet, because it's actually a long battle. And it's a long journey. And this is going to continue, because so many times it feels like people are waiting to see that. "Okay, there will be a day when she will say, 'Okay, I'm done. I can't run this anymore' ".

Sabrina Merage Naim
They're waiting for you to fail.

Priti Pugalia
Absolutely. It comes as a reality every now and then. And it's something that you have to just embrace, I feel. Because it's the process of what you're trying to do. And I personally feel I cannot challenge it, I don't want to. I think some of the things will just come on the surface as they are true. So, you have to just be on the action of it. And you have to keep doing it every single day. And that's what we are doing at Craft Boat. So a lot of small things that we do and the kinds of conversations me and Carly have about what we're trying to do with women in our team, and how do we envision it? For five years, we've been working with each other, we've come a long way by just discussing very small steps that we want to do. So I think it's, today when we look back, each and every day mattered, of how we are taking decisions at the workplace, because this is what is our tool of change.

Kassia Binkowski
So let's talk about that for a second. Because right now, 85% of the world's garment workers are women, many of whom are underpaid, overworked and trapped in cycles of generational poverty. You two are tackling this from slightly different angles, but obviously in close collaboration with each other. So what can you tell us about each of your models, and then where your paths crossed?

Carly Burson
Sure. I mean, Priti I can start. So for us at LAUDE the Label, our partnerships are everything, to who we are as a business, what our success looks like, I think what we've learned, especially in this last year, navigating business together through a global pandemic is, if Priti and her team are not thriving, we're not thriving. So we really run our businesses side by side, and they... I wouldn't even say it's an intersect, it feels like it's one of the same. For us, it's really important to be able to do a good job of running and managing a business in the US from a marketing perspective, from a creative perspective, a design perspective, so that we're successful in selling products and reaching out to the right audience of customers. And the end goal of that, hopefully, successful result is that we're employing people sustainably and we're employing more people and bringing more opportunity to our artists and partners. So we really view any success and any growth from our end as an opportunity to employ more people and I hope that Priti and her team do feel as, over the years as we've grown, they've grown. I think something that's really remarkable is, Priti started with a really small team in India when she created Craft Boat, and this last year managed over 4,000 artisans through multiple different productions, across multiple different products. Through a pandemic, managing men, women, even managing teams that are diverse from a religious perspective, which isn't common in India, that people of different faiths are working side by side, and we just view it as something that we've created.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Carly, you once said, "the single most effective antidote to poverty and social injustice is the emancipation of women". Many of our conversations, for the purpose of this podcast to date, have focused on the subtle, but really significant shifts that happen when women are at leadership tables. Leading conservation, leading health care, leading politics, but what you guys are talking about is a little different. You're talking about the truly transformational impact of investing in women at the very opposite end of the opportunity spectrum. So women who sometimes don't have access to basic services, or who struggle to feed their families, women stuck in generational poverty. So my question is, what key do these women hold to breaking those cycles for future generations?

Carly Burson
I mean, for me, women are really the key to it all. You know, research has shown us that women are the pathway to alleviate poverty worldwide, based on what they do with opportunity and what they do with their income. Women invest 70% of their income into their children, into health care, into their communities, into healthy food, as opposed to 30% of their male counterpart. So our belief, and what we've seen time and time again, is when you invest in one woman, when you empower one woman, she turns around and invests and empowers 100 more. So, I think giving women opportunity, they pay it forward. And that's the only way that we're going to break these cycles. And these systems, they invest in their daughters, who will then grow up to hopefully be empowered women as well, and give back to their communities and continue to perpetuate opportunity forward. And we just don't see that in men. We see more, when men are empowered, and when men are given wages, they tend to hold on to it for themselves in a way that women just don't. And we don't really know the reason for that, but we do know that research and statistics tell us that that is true. So we believe if we can reach a handful of women, we can reach a thousand more, and hopefully, those ripple effects will start to have a true impact on generations to come. And we really can't solve inequality for women and gender bias. We can't solve any of it if women continue to live in poverty, and 70% of the world's poorest people are women. So I think we have to start recognizing that poverty is actually sexist, and it is affecting one gender pretty specifically.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And I think the frustrating thing about what you're saying is that we actually have now, the data and the research for decades that what you're saying is true. That when investing in women, the butterfly effect is significantly more than when investing in men. And that has been proven through the model of micro-financing, that has been proven with the model of just straight philanthropy, and what you're saying now, in empowering women through business, and artisans. And yet, culturally, the shift still has not been made and the minds of those around us who are in positions of influence and leadership have not been made up about that, and someone like Priti is still on the ground after everything that she's accomplished, getting that pushback. So Priti, I want to turn it to you, to understand from your perspective, now that you've accomplished what you have...

Kassia Binkowski
Employing, 4,000 individuals. Yeah.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Which is a huge number of people. What will it take for the system in India, specifically, to look at you and be like, "you know what this woman is not only enterprising, but she's a powerhouse, let's invest in her".

Priti Pugalia
For me, I would say one very big thing that changed was that someone walking up and showing that belief system. Showing that firmness that, here I am investing in you, and I know you can do it, and I'm here for you. So, just do it. And I think that what created the butterfly effect for all of us. For me, I would on my heart say it was Carly because she did not hesitate, even for one sitting miles away from me and not even knowing where I come from. And she was for once that moment, which felt like universe to me, because I did not know where was she coming from? She didn't know me. And she just said, "I believe". I think she had that belief. And I had that belief that someone is believing me, I have to do it. That courage. And if I get that courage, that's what I will give, because that's what I'm getting. And that's exactly what I did. Every woman who came to me for work, I said, "you can do it". And if you fall down, I'm here to pick you up. And then that became the language of Craft Boat.

Kassia Binkowski
As you've grown to employ 4,000 individuals, what impact does meaningful employment have on the course of a woman's life? Can you point to some specific stories?

Priti Pugalia
Absolutely. So I feel when we're talking about meaningfully employing women and making them understand what is it like to be working and to earn a good living wage? Is we see a difference where something as simple as they have started knowing, how would they want to celebrate a festival? How would they want to educate their children? How would they like to feed their children? Otherwise, like I said previously, and I keep saying it, they had to just perform what they were asked to do. And they were never allowed to speak what they would be wanting to do. So no one was dreaming, no one was able to dream because they did not have the power to dream. And if you don't have an imagination, you just do what you've been asked to do. So if the child has to eat this, the child has to eat that. And it's something that is rooted in India, so I feel that women who are working with us for change, I felt it mostly in them is they started understanding the kind of health they want to give their children, the kind of nutrition they want to give their children, the way they want to enjoy their family lives and not feel supressed and just follow along. And most importantly, I feel that since they felt respected, they were bringing back home something with pride and a lot of hard work. They were respected to speak what they wanted to do. So there's a change. And it's a big change because most of their children are going to very good education now. And by good I mean better than what they could have even imagined at that point in their lives.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I think it's also important to highlight again, that something that you're talking about is the support system of women for each other is so instrumental in being able to create that culture shift that for so long, I think a lot of women were waiting for men to kind of come to their senses and come help, right? And in many cases, and this is something that we've spoken about a lot, yes, we do need our male counterparts to be our allies and to be our advocates, but we're not sitting back and waiting for them to figure out that this shift needs to happen culturally and societally, for our worlds to head into a better place. Women are supporting each other, encouraging each other, lifting each other up in a way that is really changing the narrative. And Priti something that you highlighted, which I think is just so important is that that's what in some ways Carly did for you. And that's what now you're doing for countless women. And that, again, the butterfly effect of that, I think, is really important. It's something that's going to be huge. So, Carly, I want to turn it back to you because you've started this conversation off by talking about the aha moment that you had when you and your husband were in Ethiopia for quite a significant amount of time and saw what was going on on the ground there with the adoption system and the crisis and adopting your daughter, Ellie. And then at some point a few years later, Priscilla came into your life. And I want to kind of hear, was there another aha moment? Because she fled as a teenager, Guatemala, I'm assuming under not the best of circumstances. Risked a lot to come to this country pregnant. And she came into your life and the circumstances were different than when you were in Ethiopia adopting Ellie. What happened to you, what shifted for you that then also became an important piece of LAUDE the Label?

Carly Burson
Well, I think, you know, we employ a lot of women in Latin America. And the challenges there for women are pretty extreme in the same way that they're extreme for women in India. So I think I already had an understanding of why Priscilla fled and why she needed to flee. And why she didn't feel like there was a life there for her unborn child. I think it reinforced the passion and the motivation that I was initially driven by to create more opportunity for women. It started with women not being able to raise their own children. And it's grown into women needing to flee their own homes, and nobody wants to leave their home. Nobody wants to leave their family. So the fact that poverty tears families apart, you know, for Ellie, it being her birth mother not being able to raise her but for Priscilla, and for most immigrants and migrants that reach our southern border, they're having to make a decision to leave everything and everyone that they know and love. And then they get to our country, and they're treated like criminals. And quite frankly, they're not even treated like humans. And children are separated, and humans are put in cages. And that was the experience that my daughter went through. And so for me, I think it really just furthered my dedication to this mission of providing women with opportunity. If Priscilla had an opportunity in Guatemala, she would have stayed. If she had safety in Guatemala, she would have stayed. If she had resources, to be able to be a teen mother and raise a baby in Guatemala, she would have stayed, she had no choice but to, as a child herself, cross through Mexico, and the southern border of Arizona by herself and be taken into a detention facility as a 15 year old, that was nine months pregnant. And so for me, I think of all of the things that she could have had and should have had in her own country, in her own home, and the things that her mother should have been given and the opportunities her mother should have had. And now Priscilla's country is... I mean Priscilla's family is completely torn apart because of poverty. Poverty rips families apart. And I think there's enough resources and enough money, and enough jobs to go around in this world, so that everyone has the opportunity to raise their family in their own home. But we hoard it for just 1% of us. And it's why the world looks the way that it does. It's why 90% of the world lives in such extreme poverty. And I think it also helped me realize the challenges of what's going on in the US. Immigration is a huge issue in our country, the way that we handle asylum seekers is a huge issue. So it's not only influenced my work, but that experience has influenced who I am as a human and who I am as an activist and the causes that I get behind and invest my time in. Because I think it's one of the leading issues of our generation.

Sabrina Merage Naim
I want to fundamentally understand the partnership between your two companies is deeply committed with the idea of creating meaningful employment with living wages for all makers. Break it down for our audience, what goes into calculating a living wage, how is it different from fair or direct trade practices?

Carly Burson
Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, a living wage is very different from a fair trade wage. A fair trade wage at this point is actually pretty outdated. But it's pretty simple. a living wage means that a person working full time are able to provide the basic needs for their families, and the way that I sort of break it down for people living in the US. You know, where I live in Texas, the minimum wage is $7.25. And the majority of our population makes $7.25, but the living wage, the wage that's calculated and assumes that based on our cost of living, that a person is able to live in a healthy way, provide sustainably for their family, means that they're making $15. So even in the United States, we're asking workers to work for half of what they need to live. And that is perpetuated worldwide. So there are many calculators that you can use to calculate what a fair living wage looks like. It varies by region. It varies by city in India the same way that it would vary by region and city in the United States. So we work really closely with organizations where that's what they do, they analyze cost of living, they set living wage calculators, and we work really hard to stay within that calculator. And it also is based on skill, just like it is in the US, you know, we want even our baseline entry level workers to be making a living wage for what their skill set, and their job is. And then the same for our highly skilled managerial workers should be making a living wage that's also based on their skill set. So there's opportunity to grow and advance and there's been many women on our team at Craft Boat, where it's their first time ever working, ever earning a wage, and now some of them are in managerial positions, and their wage reflects that.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So I want to challenge this for a second, from the perspective of, you know, entrepreneur, capitalist mentality. Some of our listeners, I'm sure, and people who are close to me in my life, of course, who are business owners and say that if we raise the minimum wage in this country to $15 an hour, it is not sustainable for manufacturers, or for people who have certain levels of salaries that they need to meet, and it would really cut into their bottom line significantly to the point where they would need to close down their businesses. And you, Carly, have have mentioned, and I've read also, that for LAUDE the Label, you focus more on impact than on profits. But for people who are really focused on their bottom line, which is, frankly, most of the business world, how are you responding to them when they say, that's great and good for you that you're trying to like, save the world, but I'm trying to run a business.

Kassia Binkowski
I can't wait for Carly's answer. I'm like pass the mic!

Carly Burson
I mean, great question. First of all, I'm not a capitalist, I think capitalism is the cruelest thing that has ever happened to the world. Capitalism is a game of winners and losers, and 1% of us are winners and the rest of us are losers. So I think capitalism in business is cruel and inhumane, period. But I think it is false that paying somebody a living wage is going to close businesses and destroy communities. I mean, when people have money, they put money back into the economy. So for me, if we can lift families out of poverty, and we can bring more families to the table to be able to invest money in the economy and invest in homes and invest in healthy food and consume more consciously. That benefits everybody. When we have people living in poverty, that affects all of us. That affects all of our communities. I also think that, sure, business can focus on a bottom line. And of course, most businesses need to make a profit. I choose to not take a salary for my work at LAUDE because I want to stay true to why I started LAUDE. It's not about money, and it is about female empowerment. But that is a very privileged thing that I'm able to make that choice. So I'm not asking businesses to not make money. But when we look at the majority of businesses in the US and the majority of businesses that are not paying people a living wage, it's not just small businesses, it's businesses that are profiting billions of dollars at the end of the year, millions of dollars at the end of the year, if you were profiting like that, you have the money to invest in your people, and your people will then invest in the economy. So it's an argument of greed. It's an argument of stockpiling more capital and money than businesses actually need. And even economists say that it is a false argument that if we lift people out of poverty, if we give them a chance to rise, communities rise, businesses rise, there's more people paying into a system and more people supporting small businesses, more people investing their money in the economy. So I just can't even entertain the argument. Not even just from an economic standpoint, from a human standpoint, if you're running a business paying someone a wage where they can't go home and feed their family, what are you doing in business? You're doing something incredibly wrong.

Kassia Binkowski
Priti I want to talk about the fashion industry specifically now. In what ways, I mean, obviously, the living wage is part of what you guys are doing radically differently than most companies. But as a fashion manufacturer, at its core, what else are you doing differently? What is your relationship to those 4,000 employees look like that is different than a traditional fashion manufacturer?

Priti Pugalia
Yeah, so I'm really enjoying this conversation, because moving out of manufacturing, and having this conversation is really important. And so thank you so much. And I just feel one thing that I want to add about the living wage part is that I feel that companies who are like Carly, very rightly said, when she's saying that she's not capitalist, it's a very strong statement for a business woman to even say something like that, because it's an inevitable truth, so how do you hold yourself for that? But I feel with LAUDE, what I've very importantly learned, is that asking the right questions to your manufacturers and taking out that time to ask them that question, because just as much as you do the macro level planning in your businesses, it's a lot of micro level planning that helps. And I think every time I'm questioned from LAUDE that, how do you do this? And can we get an alternative to this? It just makes a manufacturer question that "okay, yes, this is what's needed. And this is where I have to think and do". So asking the right questions is very, very important, no matter whatever you are trying to do. So that helps in a lot of micro level planning, which is what's making all the difference when we are trying to do something. I think, on a fashion manufacturing point of view, the kind of differences that we are trying to create is, apart from just women being employed in our team, we have been, it's been almost two years that we have, we are associated with an organization which develops scale for specially abled people. So we have a lot of people who have hearing and speech impairments, we have people who have disabilities where they are working with us, and they're working in the most extraordinary way with us where it's absolutely inspiring to see the kind of job they have taken upon with us. And one very, very recent observation that we had is we had a lot of old tailors coming in working with us, who were not given work in other factories where they were getting old, and people thought that they would not be able to produce just as much per hour as they should be. And honestly, this was not in the plan. But it just happened that we, since I think it was there subconsciously that we are running an organization, you really do not after a point meet someone to come and poke you again and again and tell you what is right to do. And we observe that we have a lot of dealers and masters who are old in age. And one day, they just came up and told us that it's rare that a company is employing older people to come and sit on machines because they're supposed to not perform as they should be. And we did not realize that we were doing that. We were just taking them as they came, they showed us their skill and we felt they could do it. And they are doing it. Now the challenge would of course come as we grow. As we grow more and we become bigger. I'm very sure that these kinds of questions will become a point of concern and highlight because you will question that, "Okay, I need these many units. Why are they not coming?" But I think the inclusive model is where we have to then start planning right away from today itself, that how do we make it more inclusive?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Collectively, you both have contributed to the construction of a new supply chain, one that really honors the dignity of women at both ends, the consumers as well as the artisans. And I don't think it's hard to imagine what you want the future of fashion to look like. But what about the future of feminism, which is frankly, a word that has at one point and often still is a divisive word, the divisive connotation, and it's lived through so many waves of activism and impact, but what does the future of feminism look like to you both in your work?

Carly Burson
Really good question. Priti and I talk a lot about feminism. I think the things I battle as a woman in the US, there's a lot of similarities to what Priti battles in India. But there are things that she comes across as an Indian woman that truthfully, I can't even imagine. So I think feminism looks different everywhere in the world and what we're fighting for. But it is a collective goal. I think, for me, the future of feminism and the goal, I think the calling for right now for feminism is women recognizing that it is collective, that I can't rise if you can't rise. And if you can't rise, I can't rise, it's just, you know, I feel like we have to recognize it as something that we're fighting for collectively. It's definitely not an individualistic mission. We have to view feminism for all women, all women in every country. I do think that we need women to support each other more in this movement, because though there are men that are important players in the movement, I do not believe that it's men that are going to get us there. I think we're going to have to force men to get there, which is challenging. I think patriarchy exists everywhere, and systems are aligned to benefit men. And they were never designed to benefit women. So I think we first have to start with one, supporting each other, being committed to being in the fight together. And being committed to slow progress. I tend to like to see things happen quickly. And that's just never going to happen in the fight for the emancipation of women. But I think we have to just start we have to be committed to whittling away at and chipping away at these systems of patriarchy that exist worldwide.

Kassia Binkowski
Priti what is it that you want from the next generation of Indian girls and for girls around the world?

Priti Pugalia
I think I would just want that, if they are given an opportunity 1%, to perform, to be out and to just do even that little one step of becoming who they really are. I think they should just do it and not feel fear in them. I just feel the future of feminism for me is deep rooted to a lot of fear that women are, I think nurtured with and I just feel that together, we are able to make it a little more fearless. And just add that a sense of, not this is right and that is wrong, but a sense of together, we can all find the way. And that's the only way we can, I think, make any difference. It's for sure going to be slow. But given even a little bit of a window, I think they should just move out and breathe and feel a little less fear.

Carly Burson
I completely agree with Priti. When we look at the big picture of feminism and the big picture of breaking down systems. But when I think about what I want for my daughters, I want them to live without being afraid. Because as a woman, as a grown woman, I do not live without fear. And so I do think Priti that that's really an important, achievable step. That we create a world where generation of young girls won't know that they have to be afraid because of their gender.

Sabrina Merage Naim
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