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Gary Bond is a past member
of the Board of Directors of the Fair Trade Federation, Jan Merrill
is a past Board Member and Treasurer of the Fair Trade Federation.
Carol Horner is past Vice President of Global
Village International Arts and Crafts Inc.
Gary Bond and his wife Jan Merrill
started the company that would one day become Global Marketplace
after organizing several fund-raisers selling gift packages of
coffee from theThanksgiving Coffee Company. The Thanksgiving
Coffee Company works with small coffee growers in Central America.
Gary and Jan heard about Thanksgiving Coffee at a Democratic
Party event, where the organizer took orders for the coffee and
shipped the coffee later. When a fund-raiser for the Peace Center
in Palo Alto, California, came up, Gary and Jan bought $500 of
Thanksgiving Coffee up front, and sold the 1-pound gift bags
at a Holiday Fair in December, 1987. All the coffee sold in two
days, and the idea of retailing items over the counter was born.
In December, 1990, Gary and Jan
organized a fund-raiser at their church, and sold Thanksgiving
Coffee, crafts from Pueblo-to-People, and Earth Care notecards
and gift wrap made from recycled paper. Many customers told them
how much they appreciated the idea that their purchases were
helping not only the church, but the craftspeople in Central
America and the environment.
It was after this fund-raiser
that Gary realized there was enough consumer demand for socially-responsible
products for him to build a retail business. To test this idea,
Gary rented a space at the largest local flea market in April,
1991, and successfully sold crafts and recycled paper products.
The retail business was launched! Gary and Jan did more flea
markets and special events in 1991 and finished the year with
a Holiday store within the local Sears department store. This
proved so successful that in March, 1992, Gary registered the
name Global Village (now know as Global Marketplace) and opened
a small retail store in Los Altos, California. After Gary realized
the store was in the wrong location for walk-by traffic, he moved
the business to a popular shopping center, Vallco Fashion Park
in Cupertino, California, for the Holiday season in 1993.
In April 1994, Gary hired staff
from local colleges and opened a full-time cart at Vallco. In
April, 1996, Gary and Carol Horner opened a 1000-square foot
retail store (Global Village) there. The store did very well
until the decline of the shopping center reduced the foot traffic
so much that sales declined sharply. The store was closed in
December 1998. After a small trial of a cart at Valley Fair Shopping
Center, Gary realized the Web was where the future of retailing
crafts was and after closing the cart upgraded the online catalog
and went online in the Spring of 1999. By the end of 1999 online
sales were so good that the decision was made to make this the
new home of Global Marketplace.
The main reason Gary, Jan, and
Carol are retailing crafts is to help artists, their families,
and villagers in developing nations make a better living. They
have learned that it takes more than just retailing the crafts
for this to happen. It
takes changes in consumer, business, and government policy to
really raise people above the poverty line. For this reason they announced in 1999 the creation
of Global Marketplace, a non-profit corporation. In this way
they can better build support for for these policy changes. |
