Traidcraft unveils new plan
Robin Roth, CEO of Traidcraft, tells The Friend about the plan to rescue the company from closure
Traidcraft, the Christian retailer promoting Fairtrade goods, has unveiled a plan to rescue it from the threat of closure.
The long-established Fairtrade pioneer, which started in Newcastle in 1979, has said it had to make ‘substantial’ cuts to jobs since it announced earlier this year that it was struggling. The company made a loss of about £500,000 last year.
Robin Roth, chief executive officer (CEO) of Traidcraft, told the Friend that the company has had to shrink its workforce ‘to the bone’, from around seventy to twelve. He said: ‘That’s the painful bit and we’ve been through the mill emotionally, which is why the many Quaker letters we received cheered us up, knowing people are standing in solidarity with us.’
The charity will also be reducing the number of products it sells, focusing only on core grocery items such as toilet and cleaning materials, coffee, tea, orange juice and jam.
It has also announced a new plan of ‘working with communities rather than individuals to reduce costs’, and exploring the benefits of promoting ‘membership’.This would include ‘access to information about the supply chain’.
According to Robin Roth, the wider strategy is to promote the issue of ‘transparent trade’. He said: ‘People were asking: what is the point of Traidcraft? The answer is that we can be accountable. We can say exactly what we pay producers. Once you are armed with that kind of information, you are empowered. We realised we could be a guiding light in a very murky world.’
The cause of Traidcraft’s ailing commercial arm has been attributed to factors such as declining church membership, years of austerity and the success it had pioneering Fairtrade, leading other competitors to jump on the bandwagon. The charity’s sales peaked in 2010 with around £16.5 million and have been falling at a rate of around eight per cent a year.
Robin Roth told the Friend: ‘We encouraged Fairtrade customers to demand Fairtrade products from supermarkets, which they did. Now we need to send the opposite message, that actually buying supermarket Fairtrade products may not be good enough. We’re going to annoy a lot of people who do Fairtrade at the moment and think they have ticked our box.’
According to an interview with the BBC in October, the UK’s vote to leave the EU was a ‘transformational moment’ for Traidcraft.
Robin Roth said: ‘The value of sterling fell on that day by seventeen per cent against the dollar. We buy everything in dollars. That alone cost us just shy of a third of a million pounds in one go.’
Comments
Please login to add a comment
