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The Waste-Free Celebrations Story

EMMA CONYNGHAM

WANAKA, NEW ZEALAND

It was winter 2020. New Zealand was in and out of lockdowns. I was looking to earn enough money to hire a campervan to take the family on a road trip around the South Island for our summer holiday.

With zero business experience and even less cash, I purchased some Christmas cotton to sew into reusable gift bags to sell at the local market. I had been using reusable fabric bags for years and all my friends and family loved them so I figured, why not, because that’s always a good premise to start a business isn’t it?

I made my own website and posted the link to facebook and by the time I woke up the next morning my phone wouldn’t turn on. It took me a while to realise the constant notifications from each sale pinging was crashing my phone.

I was such a novice I hadn’t even set inventory on the listings. It never occurred to me I would sell out and keep selling stock that didn’t exist.

I had more orders than I could possibly fulfil so I did what anyone with zero experience but bullish determination would do and I bought out all the Christmas fabric in New Zealand and hired 12 local women to sew for me. I was cutting fabric on the dining table until 3am each night then sewing all day from 1 September until Christmas eve.

I was fuelled by sheer determination and the fear of failure (and Central Otago pinot noir TBH). This. Would. Work. And thus, a business was born and we took our campervan holiday. 

I love Christmas, the dressing up, the festivity, the colour, the family, the good gifts... The FOOD!!! We love any celebration! Eid Mubarak, please pass the Goash-E-Feel. Matariki? Grab a blanket, let’s watch the stars. Hanukkah? Let’s light those candles.

In clean green Aotearoa, home to just 5.5 million people, every year we use enough wrapping paper to go around the earth 1.5 times. Australia uses enough to go around the earth 4.5 times, while the UK uses enough to go to the moon. The US uses enough gift wrap to go to the moon and back NINE TIMES.

All of it is just pretty single-use packaging. This created a conflict. How to celebrate with all the colour and fun of our cherished festive traditions but without compromising our planet?

In 2021 we hired Afghan refugee women to sew for us. I had been a humanitarian worker in Kabul from 2004 - 2006 so I had a deep connection to the country and the people. These women faced many barriers to employment in New Zealand and also suffered a lot of mental health challenges and language difficulties.

Sewing together helped financially but it also helped them form connections and regain the dignity of being able to provide for their families.

But after three years of manufacturing in NZ, we faced the financial reality of closing the business or taking manufacturing offshore as New Zealand just couldn’t produce these items cost-effectively.

We considered China for about 3 minutes but the answer was staring us right in the face: Afghanistan. My Head of Production, Rahila, who left Afghanistan when she was two and grew up as a refugee in Pakistan, wanted to go back to Kabul to be with her mother.

Rahila volunteered to head the business up to provide employment for women who were in dire circumstances under the Taliban regime. Bear in mind, Rahila only had education to year 6; was married by 13 and had her first child by 14. She had 6 young children and became a widow and was living in desperate poverty in Peshawar, Pakistan before qualifying for UNHCR’s refugee quota with the NZ government. She arrived in NZ in 2014. 

Ten years after arriving in New Zealand, Rahila returned to Kabul in January 2024 and registered our business as a woman-owned business (with full support from the Taliban much to our surprise).

She found the premises, purchased the machines, got solar power installed, hired the staff and started production. To say her learning curve was “steep” is an understatement! We now have 26 women sewing for us but could quadruple that if we had more sewing machines.

What is a reusable gift bag or fun reusable Christmas cracker for you, is an economic lifeline of hope for women in Kabul.

We wish you a merry waste-free celebration.

Start your reusable collection today

Currently, all orders we don’t have capacity for, are offloaded to a factory in Pakistan. Whilst this is also part of our risk-mitigation strategy as manufacturing in Afghanistan is insanely high risk.

The fact is we want to employ more women in Kabul. (Why not get a loan to buy more machines? Because there isn’t a bank on earth that will loan money for capital expenditure in Afghanistan. We can only do this off the back of sales or donations). 

We could quadruple the number of women sewing for us if we had more sewing machines. Would you like to help with a direct donation?

Watch now: A Christmas factory in the heart of Afghanistan

2024 – Enjoying traditions without waste