Babies, toddlers and children smile with wonder at the cute designs and quirky expressions, parents smile at the joy of watching their little ones and knowing that their purchase also helped a family a long way away, and the Hathay Bunano artisans smile knowing that they have sustainable, regular and flexible employment and a chance to give their own children a better life.
Meet the Hathay Bunano artisans
2004
Shortly after arriving in Bangladesh, Samantha Morshed started Hathay Bunano ps, a non-profit organization. Through a local NGO she invited 12 young women to her home in Dhaka and taught them to knit in her spare room. After three weeks practicing knitting they started to work on the first order.
2004
With 24 women knitting in Samantha’s spare room every day and more work than we could manage it was time to open our first rural production centres in Narshingdi, about 2 hours drive from the capital Dhaka. We chose two locations and Samantha visited them 3 days a week for 2 months teaching them to knit.
2004
With Samantha’s husband, Morshed, now involved in the project, finally we found our first head office in Ibrahimpur and the 24 women who had been knitting at Samantha’s home transferred there. The aim was to grow through private label and to apply lessons learnt from the vast garments industry in Bangladesh to the much smaller handicrafts industry with a view to creating a ‘handicrafts project’ that could scale.
2009
With more than 2000 women working in rural production centres around the country and inclusion of crèche facilities and pre-schools where possible, our founder, Samantha Morshed was honoured with MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) from the Queen for her services to the rural poor women of Bangladesh.
2009
HBPS was commended on its work and achievements by President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.
2010
It was clear that to continue to scale and to demonstrate that it was possible to scale the handicrafts sector in Bangladesh, we would have to start a brand. Having spent much of 2009 designing new products for Pebble and working on the branding, it was launched in January 2010 in the UK and Australia.
2012
Pebblechild UK Ltd and Pebblechild Malaysia Sdn Bhd were incorporated to facilitate distribution of Pebble products through Europe and Asia Pacific.
2013
The case study of HBPS, written by Prof Kevin McKague, Samantha Morshed and Habibur Rahman was published in the MIT Innovations journal as an example of how to create good quality employment for the young, illiterate, unskilled women of rural Bangladesh at scale. It became the ‘how to’ guide worldwide for scaling handicrafts projects.
2014
Rayhan Kabir was appointed Executive Director of HBPS, having worked up through the ranks and understanding the mission of this social enterprise intimately. Pebble is selling through 17 distributors in 34 countries.
2016
In March 2016 we relaunched our website to enable direct ecommerce. With such a large catalogue of products and knowing that not all retailers stock all products we wanted to be able to ensure that there was a single place where customers could find every single Pebble product.
2019
Continuing to increase transparency and accountability and ownership by those who make this social business so fabulous, we’ve introduced shareholding options for senior staff.
2021
In December 2021 we moved into our new warehouse in Malton, York. We are now picking and packing all your orders and despatching directly from our own warehouse and HQ. We aim to despatch all your orders same day and we’ve reintroduced the next day delivery service on the website now that we can be sure that orders are going out on time. It’s a big step for us to have our HQ in the UK and it really reflects our commitment to the brand and to ensuring our customer focus is everything you would expect.
2023
Whilst we were very happy at Unit 9 on the enterprise park and having our own warehouse and despatching your orders ourselves felt like such a big step forward, it was only ever a temporary measure. On 8th July 2023 we moved into our new permanent space. WOW! We have a mezzanine floor with an office and space to build in a nursery as a permanent photoshoot space. So Unit 6, 15 Cherry Farm Close, Malton is where we’ll be forever. We now have a warehouse manager and so the next chapter starts …
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