If you’ve gotten a gift from us in the past few years, it would have shown up in a bag like this one:
Here’s the story behind that bag…
Carrying Our Values With Us
One of our core Thinkst values is to “do well by doing good” (we actually have 4 of them). We donate to Open Source projects we use. We offer no-strings-attached bursaries to South African tertiary students. We support local charities who protect, uplift, and believe in our most vulnerable populations.
The first core value is delight: We delight our customers.
With our product, with our support, and even with our gifts, we strive to delight our customers. We pride ourselves on sweating the small stuff; gifts get vetted internally (from shirts, to tools, to flasks) long before they get sent to customers. We wrap, we write notes, we sprinkle it with green.
And, on some happy occasions, we get to combine these two values.
Who doesn’t love to unwrap a gift? The suspense, the surprise, the love; it’s all there. As well as the single-use wrapping paper that lands up in the bin…
So, we decided to rethink our gift wrapping. We still wanted our gifts to be covered and protected when shipping to customers, but also, we wanted this wrapping to be functional, reusable and, at the same time, support our community. Three years ago we partnered with Sparrow Society and their SewBoss Program to create our Thinkst Canary gift bags.
The SewBoss Program
Sparrow Society, based in Cape Town, South Africa, is a women’s empowerment brand that focuses on creating opportunities for women to overcome gender-based violence and other social inequalities. By moving away from the traditional relief and aid model (and not just a factory with low wages and no benefits) , they instead help women set up their own independent, home-based, sewing business.
It is more than skills training and goes beyond mere job creation. It is a full circle Enterprise Development program where we help set her up for business and provide a central training, procurement, and distribution hub that allows her to access global manufacturing contracts for some really cool international brands. The SewBoss has the security of access to ongoing work while being able to reap the benefits of home-based entrepreneurship, and the network provides the benefits of support and logistics that are usually only available to larger companies.
This program takes seamstresses who used to be lower-level workers in factories to running their own thriving businesses!
You can check out one of their case studies here.
Thinkst 💚 SewBoss
With the help of (now) +200 women-owned sewing businesses in the SewBoss Network, we have a reusable gifting bag.
We not only send our customer gifts in these bags, but they are now also a staple at all of the conferences we attend. They’re a handy grab-bag for just about anything; kids beach bags, to shoe-travel bags.
Gifting and conference bags that don’t suck and (hopefully) remain useful.
Sew, keep it in mind the next time you grab one of our bags at an expo or as part of a gift. You’re helping us help our neighbours.
