The fashion industry impacts the lives of all kinds of people from the farmers to the models, for this week’s blog we get a glimpse of how one women utilized her experiences industry to assist women and families in the Philippines.
Renee Patron took the leap in creating a social enterprise with the establishment of her company
Banago. Having worked in fashion for over a decade, moving back and forth between Los Angeles and New York, Patron took her expertise and founded Banago in her mother’s hometown of Samara, Philippines. The company not only employed women in the manufacturing of the high quality weaved bags and accessories that utilized the banig weaving technique but employed the farmers who produced the raw materials. “Banago
Business was going well, with orders come in from vendors when Typhoon Haiyan, known as Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines, occurred on November 8th 2013. This destroyed the homes of the artisans, the finished products for Japan and the US as well as the raw materials grown on the fields by the farmers. “If we were properly warned, we would have put our materials and finished products somewhere higher,” Patron lamented to the LifeEASTyle Magazine. “Nobody knew what storm surge meant, nobody explained it. The last item we saw on the news that evening was Janet Napoles.”[2] Patron rallied and began thinking of means of assisting the artisans and farmers and began putting in motion means to start rebuilding the business. A Kickstarter fundraiser, assisted in raising money to enable Banago in getting back into production, they successfully raised
[1] “About Us,” Banago, http://i-love-banago.myshopify.com/pages/about-us.
[2] Momar Visaya, “Banago: Helping restore livelihood in Samar, one Malaya tote bag at a time,” Asian Journal, Oct 3, 2014, http://asianjournal.com/aj-magazines/banago-helping-restore-livelihood-in-samar-one-malaya-tote-bag-at-a-time/.