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Bangladesh Maternity & Women's Project

About our fairtrade soft toys and organic baby booties and rattles

We are proud to be re-introducing a stunning range of hand crafted gifts and baby accessories from a wonderful scheme in Bangladesh. An associate member of Ecota Fair Trade Forum, this is a Fair Trade Organisation whose aim is to produce fairly traded items which are marketable in the West and provide a better life for those who make them in Bangladesh.

The business employs over 5,000 women in 52 different regions of Bangladesh to knit, crochet and sew these adorable toys. The women have fair, flexible and stable employment, which really can make a huge change to their lives - it means that they can work in their rural areas, where they can be with and provide for, feed and educate their children without having to leave for the cities or live in slums. Any profits achieved are re-invested in the communities

The craftsmanship in these products is quite exceptional. The women who make them learn to knit, sew and crochet and become true artisans. Modern machine made goods are monotonously identical, so it is a delight to find such beautifully created items which are beautifully made, yet have that unique sense of individuality which can only come from the experience and care which goes into making them.

We were so excited to rediscover this range that we ordered rather a lot of it! If our own children's reaction to it are anything to go by when they arrived, we expect it to be popular, which is great, because we will be able to order more stock, providing more fair employment for the women making them and helping their project to grow.

We currently have in stock a large range of soft toys, including the adorable steiner style dolls and rattles, the quirky birds and my personal favourite, the octopus rattle shown above. Fair trade cuddly toys and rattles - these toys are not yet organic, but the company is working on obtaining organic certification for them, when the whole range will be produced in organic yarn. The yarn is currently Oeko-tex certified, meaning that it has been dyed with a safe, eco dye.

We have a small organic range too, of organic cotton baby booties and gorgeous co-ordinating rattles