Handbag Designer 101: The Stories Behind Handbag Designers, Brands, and Industry Icons

Purpose in Every Stitch: Mercado Global’s Ethical Accessories | Emily Blumenthal & Fabiola Bercasa Beckman and Ruth Álvarez-DeGolia

• Emily Blumenthal • Season 1

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Heritage craft scales on design and strategy, not good intentions. Ruth Álvarez-DeGolia, founder of Mercado Global, and Emmy-winning filmmaker Fabiola Bercasa Beckman share how Guatemalan handwoven textiles become modern handbags that compete at Free People and Holt Renfrew. From labor hours to in-country design, they show how simplifying silhouettes increases artisan wages and perceived value, while embedding impact into the product—not a hangtag. This is a blueprint for ethical, beautiful accessories that customers want and that provide real income for the women who make them.

✨ 3 Takeaways

• Ethical fashion must compete on design and price — Impact only works if the product stands on its own at retail.
 • Simpler designs can pay artisans more — Fewer cuts and smarter layouts often increase hourly wages and margins.
 • Impact should be built into the product — Visible craftsmanship beats vague claims and one-for-one models every time.

👤 Our Guests

Ruth Álvarez-DeGolia is the founder of Mercado Global, a fair-trade accessories brand partnering with women artisans across Latin America to produce responsibly made handbags for global retail. Fabiola Bercasa Beckman is an Emmy-winning filmmaker and creative collaborator whose work focuses on design, storytelling, and ethical systems that respect craft without compromising modern appeal.

Host Emily Blumenthal is a handbag industry expert, author of Handbag Designer 101, and founder of The Handbag Awards. Known as the “Handbag Fairy Godmother,” Emily also teaches entrepreneurship at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She is dedicated to celebrating creativity, craftsmanship, and the art of building iconic handbag brands.

Find Handbag Designer 101 Merch, HBD101 Masterclass, one-on-one sessions, and opportunities to book Emily Blumenthal as a speaker at emilyblumenthal.com. 

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SPEAKER_00:

And so we know which fabrics can be used as pop detailing, which could be the core of the bag, you know, which silhouettes and materials work. And then for us it's just a design challenge. How do we combine that together in a way that's really elevated and special? And that was something fabulous that we worked on a lot with the collaboration.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we did. I mean, uh initially, like I want and and I'm so happy with the way the product came out. I wouldn't have wanted it in any other way. But like initially I was like, I want all the embroidery and all the da-da-da. But then, you know, you come down to the price and it's like, this is great. But like you said, you know, is it gonna sell? Because it is so much more with all the bells and whistles, right?

SPEAKER_01:

Hi, and welcome to Handbag Designer 101, the podcast, with your host, Emily Blumenthal, handbag industry expert, and the handbag fairy godmother. Each week we uncover the stories behind the handbags we love, from the iconic brands and top designers to the creativity, craftsmanship, and culture that define the handbag world. Whether you're a designer, collector, or simply passionate about handbags, this is your front row seat to it all. Welcome to Handbag Designer 101 the podcast. Ruth Alvarez de Golia, founder executive director of Mercado Global. I'm not saying it the right way. I'm saying it well enough, but not as well as Fabiola Bercasa Beckman, Emmy award-winning filmmaker, will say it, because you know, you're native and I'm I'm I'm a tryhard with that. So we nominated. Without Emmy nominated. Well, it's okay. You know what? To me, you've won every award. So we're just gonna keep it like that.

SPEAKER_02:

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01:

Thank you, ladies. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you both. This is exciting.

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you. We're delighted to be here.

SPEAKER_01:

Really fun. Okay, and this will be fun. Also, all conversations about anything handbag, especially let's dive into social responsibility within handbags, is fun. So, Ruth, you've been doing this for a minute. Just let us know what is the origin story of Mercado Global and what was the why of creating it. Like, this is it. Go run with it.

SPEAKER_00:

All right, I'll do the short version. The short version was that when I was an undergrad at Yale, I had the wonderful opportunity to have a series of fellowships to work in rural Guatemala, first with an association of rural indigenous communities and then doing research for my thesis. And I had no plans to start anything, but in the process of being there working with these amazing women who quickly became my heroes, it really changed my life. And these were women who never had the chance to go to school. Most couldn't read and write. Many of their husbands had been killed during the Civil War, but they were fighters and they were fighting to feed their kids every single day. It was a battle to try to be able to feed their kids. They were fighting to try to get as many of their kids into school as they could. Public education is not free in Guatemala. And while I was there, I was doing everything else. I was helping these local community organizations build the first websites, learn to do grant writing, we were applying for funding. And one of the things I learned is that there's so little international aid actually, and this was before the end of USAID. Only about actually 6% of philanthropic giving in the US goes to international causes. And so if you say, why is it that Guatemala, which is closer to New York than LA is to New York, these are our neighbors, one-tenth of all Guatemalans live in the US? Why is it that little girls aren't getting getting the chance to go to school? I think part of the answer is there. And we were trying to help with everything, but what happened was every single time I would leave a community, these women that I was working with would say, Ruth, wherever you came from, could you take our art designas and sell them? And this was before social entrepreneurship was cool and exciting and fun. And I remember going back to Yale summer after my sophomore year and setting up a table on campus. And that first week, and we sold$5,000 in products and I sent 26 little girls to elementary school for a year. And they just started selling me more product. Yeah. And it took me a while, you know, and I came, you know, I came from a family of labor leaders and had not been raised to think of business as, you know, necessarily positive. And what I realized was, wow, we just need to build a new kind of business. We need to figure out how do we help the fashion industry have positive impact through their market share, through what they do every day. And I spent my senior year applying for startup funds, was very fortunate to be able to raise that. Started full-time the day after I graduated. Our first two wholesale clients were ABC Carpenter Home and Levi Strauss. Quite a combination. And it's it's been just so amazing to have a job where you help moms send their kids to school. And we partner with designers and people in the fashion industry. And most of them, quite honestly, are not like Fabiola. Many people do not have experience going and learning about the issues in other countries and thinking about how to have an impact. But one of the things I've learned is like, who does it, if you could, through what you do every day, designing products, selling products, merchandising, if you can help moms send their kids to school, who doesn't want to do that? Who doesn't want to be part of that? And so for me, it's been incredibly rewarding to get to build this brand that helps the fashion industry have a positive impact through what they do every day. So that's kind of the short version of our origin story.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, having worked with enough designers who do what you do, two things. One, I have found that many, many people who've tried to do this have failed because they have tried to resell a product that is essentially indigenous to a country, but doesn't have the design sellability, trend, even silhouette backing, like your pockets, slip pockets, whatever that's needed on a commercial level. So a lot of people have tried and failed because they haven't gone in and said, okay, let's take some of these precious indigenous traditions you have that theoretically would be dying. Let's try to transform that into something sellable. How did you go about saying, like, let's take these skills, let's put you to work, let's help put food on the table, but let's educate you at least design-wise to create something that actually has the capacity to sell. Because again, having been in handbags for so long, I've seen people try and time and time again, like, oh, we're reselling this from a quote unquote third world country. And I said, But if you don't make changes to it, if there's not a crossbody strap, if there aren't, you know, certain things, understanding the drop or blah, blah, blah, then that ends up being a miss. And then it ends up being more harmful because then there's inventory. How did you go about that? Because I'm sure when you started out at a ripe old age of 22, like these are things you probably wouldn't have known because no one would until you get to that point, like, oh damn, like now why?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, I totally agree. And that's, I think, where you have to start by being very clear about who you are and what is the mission of your brand. And we are very clear, we are an anti-poverty organization. And for us, cultural preservation is this wonderful externality. We did not start to preserve weaving as a craftman, as a form of craft. It's this wonderful thing that happens because we created this model that's helping moms and rural communities feed theirselves, feed their families, send their kids to school, and we're able to leverage heritage weaving as a way to do that. But when it comes to thinking about decisions and how we build the brand, it's always driven by how do we maximize income for the women that we serve. And in our early years, I remember actually my main mentor as an undergrad was a professor in the anthropology department, who actually arranged for me, helped me get the fellowship where I did my research for my thesis and starting Mercol came out of that. And I remember she was actually really horrified when I started Mercolig Well because she was very worried that we were going to be changing traditional culture. And I remember, like I believe in values-based leadership, and our core values are partnership, authenticity, and respect. And so for me, it always starts with what is true to those values. And I remember right after I graduated, I went and spoke to some of the women in some of the communities where we work and asked them their thoughts about that. And one of them said, Well, Ruth, where you come from, do people have factories? And I was like, Yeah, there are some factories in the US. And she was like, Do people only wear what they make in their own factories? And it's like, no, that's what you earn for money. And then you go and buy your own products. And they're like, it's the same thing. What we're selling to tourists is not what we use for ourselves. It's what we think tourists will buy, right? And so I think that's really for us is we see master craftsmanship and heritage weaving as this wonderful skill. And it's amazing that through our work we help preserve that. But our brand to be successful, it's about combining design, modern design with heritage, heritage craft, heritage weaving. And that is what allows artisans to earn three times more per day than they could otherwise. And then also it means that they're preserving the weaving tradition, which they use to make their own traditional trajes and clothing and which are different from what they sell to tourists and different from what they sell internationally. But that's where it started. And I'll say also the last thing I'd say on that is that never miss the opportunity in a crisis. The Great Recession actually forced us to get serious about building a design program. We had not been serious about it before because we could get away with selling things that were rather looked a lot like what was being sold to tourists, which was not high as high quality. And it made or on trend per se. Exactly, exactly. It made amazing design talent affordable and accessible to us. And it forced us to do it because we couldn't get away with selling without it anymore. And it was such a huge pivot point in unlock when we started to build relationships with designers, and they came down and we learned we had to build as part of our community-based education program, we have a whole program to teach the concept of season seasons and color theory. And we'll show pictures of the artisan's products at Nordstrom and blooming deals and in free people stores so that they understand their customer. And sometimes it's really interesting to talk to an artisan about the concept of resort as a season or, you know, different things like that. But they're it's like people are so hungry to learn about that because they want to know their market. So it's exciting to get to bridge design with traditional weaving in that way.

SPEAKER_01:

I'm excited to share my new book with you. Welcome to Savvy Susanna's Amazing Adventures in Handbags and the start of Susanna's triumphant journey to become a young handbag designer. Filled with ingenuity, fun, and a hint of steam, Susanna will inspire children and you everywhere to follow their dreams and put in the hard work to get there. Savvy Susanna is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever you get your books. Thanks for your support. That's so cool. So, Fabiola, you're originally from Venezuela. Correct? I know. That's very chic. Now, you've obviously grown up in a different way, but you were clearly exposed to these kinds of native traditions. Just, and I don't like to assume these things, but I assume based on coming from Venezuela, you've seen these kind of native traditions in action and were probably very cognizant of the culture around you in terms of people trying to sustain and to be sustainable and to hold on to these kinds of patterns and prints. And, you know, you grew up in fashion. How does, because you're involved, you recently did a collaboration which I want to speak about, but how does all this resonate with you based on what your background is?

SPEAKER_02:

So thank you. You know, growing up, so I didn't really grow up in Venezuela. I was born in Venezuela and I spent a lot of time in Venezuela, a multicultural family. My grandparents on my dad's sides are immigrants to Venezuela, although we are Venezuelan. We're not indigenous to Venezuela. But having spent so much time there, and so that's where it all comes together, is the multicultural family. But having spent so much time there and growing up, it certainly much of my youth was spent there. The culture is everywhere. It's not uh something that you sort of go and find and see. It's everything that comes to you every day, whether it's like wearing a guayavera, which is like a sp a way that men dress that you won't see anywhere else but in Latin America, the homemade things, the woven things, it's kind of all incorporated in everything you see, and it becomes, you know, a vocabulary of your heritage, of what you love. So that was easy, you know, even though it's not exactly the same, because obviously Guatemala has a different aesthetic, there is a sense of familiarity for me for sure in that. And that really helps. But on top of it, of course, like Ruth said earlier, who wouldn't want to help mothers send their kids to school? And as a mother and also as an activist and as somebody who really cares about sort of the world outside of my own, because I understand the kind of privilege and fortune that I have, and I really don't want to take that for granted, nor do I want to be somebody that sort of closes everything else off. It matters to me that what I do, I do deliberately and I do with intention, and that I understand that like the I understand the effects of my actions. I think that's one of the things that people don't really always think about is the full effect of their actions, like okay, this, this, this, this, this, and to the end. So when I work with somebody like Ruth, I feel like you have to pick somebody who's like you feel has the same values as you, which Ruth and I really do. And yeah, then it becomes easy. We just work together, and and yeah, of course, I'm Latina. Ruth is Latina, I guess now. My husband is Latina. Yeah, yeah. And so that's the easy part. And and we care about, you know, humanity at large, not just women and children. Of course, we care about women and children, but about humanity, truly. And in any way that you can, you know, and wherever you can have impact. It doesn't always have to be the hugest, or you just do the best you can.

SPEAKER_01:

I think people tend to forget the microcosmic actions. And in places like Guatemala, for example, every little thing has an effect. I mean, one of the designers I had worked with years ago actually had created a collection that was made by women specifically whose husbands were incarcerated. And there is such opportunity to not only to create product, but I think much like anything, it has to have an element that it has to sell, right? Like all the good intentions in the world are great. You make a nice product, there's lots of nice product, there's lots of nice product that has a give back, but it also has to sell. You need to get people's attention, you need to make sure that there have been so many studies that have shown that Gen Z might care about give back, they might care about sustainability, but at the end of the day, so much of it goes down to price. So, how are you able to check all those boxes to ensure that not only are you creating a product that will help the first people who touch it, but the people who are the end user at the same time? Because I assume that's that's a tricky dance, especially when you're creating a product that's technically that's made by a non-for-profit, essentially, but you want it to have a commercial viability essence to it also. Is that a lot of the reason, Ruth, that you bring on people like Fabiola to help put their stamp on it to give it that extra juz?

SPEAKER_00:

Definitely. You know, I I would say we the way we talk about it internally is that the story, the story of impact has to be the icing and the cake. The cake has to be great. Like we've got to be able to, like, we have to have great product. And first and foremost, that is what we have to focus on. And then the story is just like the extra umph. And for that, we've invested in our in-house design team. We have designers from all across the Americas that have moved to Woro, Guatemala to work directly with our artisans, which is really exciting. We do product collaborations with people like Fabiola, which really help ensure the product is staying very relevant and is really exciting. And then we have additional support for the marketing and selling of the product. And price point, you're right, price price point matters too. Absolutely. And so for us, we're really clear. You know, we as a brand, we talk about connecting women across the Americas. So it's not just about the maker, it's also about the consumer. We actually believe strongly that women consumers have incredible power. 80% of household purchasing decisions are made by women in the US. Imagine if women only bought products that voted for the kind of world they wanted to live in. We'd live in a very different world, right? Different companies, different brands that would be succeeding, right? And so, but we also know that a lot of women, if they could only buy one handbag a season or one handbag a year, it needs to be a great handbag. If it also helps a mom center kids at school, amazing, right? So actually, our entire core product line, everything is under$200. 50% of our collection is under$100. So we're really clear on the price points that work. And then for us, it's just a design challenge. We know, as Fabiola knows from the the collaboration process, we we knew, you know, for every single fabric, we know how many hours it takes to weave a yard. And so we know which fabrics can be used as pop detailing, which could be the core of the bag, you know, which silhouettes and materials work. And then for us, it's just a design challenge. How do we combine that together in a way that's really elevated and special? And that was something fabulous that we worked on a lot with the collaboration.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, we did. I mean, uh initially, like I want, and and I'm so happy with the way the product came out. I wouldn't have wanted it in any other way. But like initially, I was like, I want all the embroidery and all the da-da-da. But then, you know, you come down to the price and it's like this is great, but like you said, you know, is it gonna sell? Because it is so much more with all the bells and whistles, right? Yeah, and so I think it's it's this balance where you are honoring the tradition while still marrying it with design and making sure that it's viable for a commercial market and still feeling really proud of what it is that you made. It's a balancing act, and it was really fun to do.

SPEAKER_01:

I find this so interesting because Ruth, you said something like so many people who are not, I guess, within the design world, and I Fabiola, you you probably obviously know this from making movies, but it's so much like yes, the product, but in terms of the time value of money it takes to create each piece actually ends up superseding what the product is uh when it's being created, because with limitation, I truly believe innovation always comes through because you're forced, right? Like in a perfect world, it's like I want this lining and that and that and that. But Ruth, it sounds like it's so cool. Like you have this all down to numbers, right? Like if I'm using this, this tapestry, like whatever it is, it can only cost us eight hours worth of labor. Like that's it. Anything beyond eight hours, it it bumps the price up. So no, we gotta, we gotta strip this away. Cause if we do this that it's not. So to try and create a viable product, you have to really, really dig into creativity to try and make that happen. I mean, I'm sure Fabiola, that was I I wouldn't say challenging because I hate that word, but I'm sure it was definitely uh pushing you creatively. If you ever wanted to start a handbag brand and didn't know where to start, this is for you. If you had dreams of becoming a handbag designer but aren't trained in design, this is for you. If you have a handbag brand and need strategy and direction, this is for you. I'm Emily Blumenthal, handbag designer expert and handbag fairy godmother, and this is the Handbag Designer 101 Masterclass. Over the next 10 classes, I will break down everything you need to know to make, manufacture, and market a handbag brand. Broken down to ensure that you will not only skip steps in the handbag building process, but also to save money to avoid the learning curve of costly mistakes. For the past 20 years, I've been teaching at the top fashion universities in New York City, wrote the handbag designer Bible, founded the handbag awards, and created the only handbag designer podcast. I'm going to show you like I have countless brands to create in this in-depth course from sketch to sample to sale. Whether you're just starting out and don't even know where to start or begin, or if you've had a brand and need some strategic direction, the handbag designer 101 Masterclass is just for you. So let's get started, and you'll be the creator of the next it bag. Join me, Emily Blumenthal, in the Handbag Designer 101 Masterclass. So be sure to sign up at Emily Blumenthal.com slash masterclass and type in the code ICAST to get 10% off your masterclass today.

SPEAKER_02:

So uh I I want to say that to your point, my favorite Mark Twain quote is the absence of limitations is is the killer of creativity.

SPEAKER_01:

Yep.

SPEAKER_02:

Which is my favorite. It's actually I say all the time. All the time. And it and I believe it to be very true in everything, in filmmaking, in design, in everything that you do. Yeah. And and and part of it was definitely the challenge. And and obviously when you see the collaboration and the collection at first blush, you won't think much of it, right? In in terms of what we did to alter it, but because you're just seeing it for what it is. But like if you see that particular design, right, it's really just a straight line design. That's that's what it is. What I ended up doing was taking inspiration from my favorite interior designer, Renzo Mongiardino, who's an Italian who passed a long time ago, one of the best Italian interior designers, who used to take these like fabrics and put them together in different patterns to form so it almost looks like a herringbone or something else. Right. So we took it and we took the the fabric and we sort of twisted it in, twisted it out, changed the direction of it. And if you look at it now, you'll clock it, but you wouldn't clock it if you just saw it off the bat. But to understand that that's just a linear fabric that then we took and sort of juxtaposed with each other to create a pattern. And that's the way we got creative about it.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I I always use this as uh as a template with my students where I say if you tell someone to go on a stage and do whatever they want, they will spend more time trying to figure out what to do. But if you go on tell someone to go on stage and jump, they have a baseline of something to work with. Yeah. And the interpretation of that in itself is something people can work with. Ruth, just because I don't wanna, I don't want to time suck everybody here because we could talk about this till the sun goes down. I at least I know I could. You know, you started this so young, you've been doing this for quite some time. I'm sure the hindsight of like, oh my God, had I known I had to be price point conscious, because I'm sure you went through a lot of iterations, like bags being sold upwards of$300 because of the labor, and you didn't want to slight the women and you wanted to make sure everything was the best of the best, and having to say, like, okay, we need to make compromises in order to make this sellable, because without it being sellable, we have nothing, right? How did you come full circle to get to that point saying, okay, we need to have a real design team, we need to have education, like without educating these women, we got nothing because the amount of designers, like I said, I've worked with seem to have that gap missing, where either they're still repurposing product from that country or they're having them do so much that they end up just being labor, right? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I think again, for me, it starts with being really clear about what's the goal here. And, you know, I'm I'm actually not the designer. So we have a design team, we partner with people like Fabiola, but I see if my job is building partnerships, bringing together people that would otherwise never work together, which is really exciting. And maybe that gives me an ability to have clarity and not have ego in it to help make sure we have a good framework for making these smart decisions. So I think over the years we've iterated, we've figured out as we've gone, okay, well, first we have to build a design team. Oh, then we realized to really nail this, we need to build up the artisan's ability to understand the why. Because if we're developing doing a lot of product development, when you're every day fighting to earn what you're gonna need to feed your kids that single day, it's hard to be like, okay, if you spend all this time developing this new product with us, then in six months we're gonna give you an order. But it's gonna be a really big order of thousands of pieces. That takes trust, but it also takes understanding. And so it took us a while to realize, like, okay, not only do we have to build trust with artisans, but we have to explain the why. We have to do a whole curriculum in the communities for moms so they can have their kids there to understand how the US fashion industry works and the why, so that they could be partners to us in pushing to develop new techniques. Why are we taking these traditional ECATs and simplifying them so they're more cost effective, so that they can earn more per hour and actually sell the product for more than if we did it the traditional way that's more time intensive, but we couldn't sell it for enough because it looks unfortunately in the US market. Sometimes the most time-intensive and intricate fabrics, unfortunately, are seen as cheap because middlemen have been buying them off the streets in rural Latin America and selling it for they pay nothing for it and they sell it for very little. So actually, what's ironic is that by taking this traditional technique, combining design, it may actually be faster to make it, and we can actually often sell it for more so that women earn more, which is sad, but is also reality. And for us, we're like, we are an anti-poverty organization. We want to help these women earn as much as possible. So that's our guiding star.

SPEAKER_01:

So I may ask you one other question though. And this is a silly one, but it it's it's a huge touch point for designers. Yeah. When you have a product that is so mission-based, right? Yeah, the end user when she's shopping, I'm not speaking like online shopping where you have the space to write the story. Again, this is a podcast about handbags and it's and it's a whole world. How do you deal with the hang tag situation?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, this is one of our biggest issues. One thing that we think, because we always say you have you have like what, like two seconds to sell the concern, right? If we're lucky, if we're lucky, two seconds, right? So fundamentally what we seek is through, I think actually the collaboration of Fabiola is a great example. We want to try to tell a story through the product itself. We want people to be able to look at it and see this is handcrafted, this is elevated craftsmanship, this is not made in a factory. And then we try to have the hang tag be visual and brief and kind of pull that together, be like women, you know, women in power and women, right? But it's hard, and we actually talk about it a lot internally. Like this may be, I don't know if this is good to say publicly, but one of my pet peeves is often the one-for-one model, where you know, it's so easy to it's such an easy sell.

SPEAKER_01:

Like it's such a real but it's also people don't get it. You can't one for one unless you have a product that like Bamba socks, which is one of my favorite case studies, they're able to donate socks because if you're creating socks at mass, a basic sock could cost them 10 cents a sock, whereas their other socks cost 10 times more with labor. Can't do that with handbags, does not exist. You cannot make that assumption, the one-for-one.

SPEAKER_00:

You cannot. Well, and beyond that, I would say that usually in terms of you look at cost of goods sold and where is the majority of your dollar going, it's the making of the product itself and of course bringing it to market, right? And so I would say if you want to maximize your impact, what matters the most is the labor conditions under which the product is made rather than the small value of what's donated and is the small thing that's donated, is that really going to change the life of someone? Whereas earning a living wage will change someone's life, right? But that's a much more complicated story to tell in one second or one and a half seconds, right? This is one of the things, and but it's also I think where design is important. How do we tell it's right through design? And we're still figuring that out, like physical branding, because it's a challenge, it is hard. It is especially with the talent. Yep. Hang down. And there's a lot of greenwashing out there, or like I we call it pink washing when it comes to the artisan sector. That you know, it's a great to be a cultural preservation organization if you work with artisans and you're not able to pay a living wage and you, you know, you're doing traditional things, that's great. You cultural preservation, but don't say that you're, you know, you're fair trade or that you're paying a living wage, right? But it's just what consumer has the time to understand that nuance, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Nobody, and actually, I think that that right there is a really good illustration of why I chose to work with Mercado. Is because Ruth, as you heard, you know, she really understands the true origins and complications of it's not just sort of a fluffy bit of of greenwashing, as you say. And and and that's what I am very interested in. I've worked with a lot of NGOs in my time, not just this one, many. And what I found many times over is first and foremost, the ones that the really, really big NGOs, part of the problem is they're getting all this money, but it's really just a band-aid because the laws that exist around what they're trying to change are not going to allow it to change. Yeah. So it's really, it becomes legislative versus helping, which is is sort of productive. Yeah, not productive. And then you have this other kind of side of uh sort of charitable work where it's very fluffy and not serious. And so, and I think that you know what's happened with Mercado and what happens with with Ruth is that she really understands the laws are sort of well talking about now, but generally speaking, like there is there are openings for growth and and opportunity within the legal framework. And Mercado really understands where they need to go to really truly improve at the core level the quality of life of these women, which is what matters most.

SPEAKER_01:

Ladies, like I said, we could go on and on and on about this. I don't want to take up any more of your time. Ruth, how can we find you, follow you, get more shop for Mercado Global and the amazing collaboration with Fabiola?

SPEAKER_00:

Thank you so much. Come to Mercaloglobal.org and follow us on Instagram, on Facebook, uh LinkedIn if you'd like. And we have a whole overview on the collaboration and our partnership with Fabiola. And yeah, it's a great way to get them all sent up for any newsletter.

SPEAKER_01:

And are they sold where also at retail?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, sold on our website. And also Holt Runfrew is gonna be picking it up as well, which we're really excited about.

SPEAKER_01:

And free people, right? And free people. I think that's right. Yes, and free people in the US.

SPEAKER_00:

Yep.

SPEAKER_01:

Amazing. Canada representing the same thing. And Fabiola, how can we follow you and all of your fabulousness?

SPEAKER_02:

Unfortunately, I don't have a Facebook or a LinkedIn or any of that, but I do have an Instagram. It's uh Fabs uh F-A-3Bs uh underscore S. And yeah, I mean, that's I'm not as public, but uh you can see all my fun Mercado stuff. I'm gonna be putting a bunch of once we start selling it, we do the the uh brick and mortar sales. I was gonna maybe do a post about that, and I'm super excited. There'll be a link on my Instagram as well.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, ladies, thank you so much for joining me today, and I can't wait to go find the Mercado Blobals collaboration with Miss Fabiola Bercassa Beckman. Thank you so much, guys. Thank you, Emily. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to rate and review and follow us on every single platform at Handbag Designer. Thanks so much. See you next time.

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Emily Blumenthal

Host