Eriko Yamaguchi, 25, is a successful Japanese social entrepreneur that advocates fair trade. Her ‘Mother House Co.’ is actively fostering the idea of fair trade through direct deals with producers in Bangladesh and other developing countries. She is currently selling a range of environmentally friendly bags/shoes/wallets (made of jute material) and hence creating employment opportunities for the people in Bangladesh. Essentially, her business venture is not just wealth creation per se.

The abstract below, from the Business Times Paper, dated 5th of Oct 2007, is there to remind us that there are people in this world who venture into business primarily to help people. Wealth creation is just the rewards of sheer determination and vision.

As a ‘businesswoman’, Ms Yamaguchi has ambitions to expand sales to the US and Europe but as a quasi-development worker she also wants to expand production into other poorer countries. She has already visited Indonesia and Cambodia looking for raw materials to which value can be added by using them to produce consumer goods.

Ms Yamaguchi rejects charges that she is ‘profiting’ from cheap labour and raw materials. She claims that the wages she pays in Bangladesh are ‘double the average’ and that her profit margins are low relative to those of other goods producers in the developing world. She respects the fair trade movement but argues that consumers do not want to buy developing country produce out of ‘pity’ but only if it is of the high quality she aims at. Neither is Ms Yamaguchi concerned about competition from low-cost, mass-production goods from China.

Japanese and other consumers are increasingly eager to ‘buy a story’ when they buy goods and if that story is one that has an economic development theme attached to it, they will buy it more readily than they would if it is one of mass production and global distribution chains with profit margins in their every link, she says.

Source: “Capitalism with a human face”, Anthony Rowley Tokyo Correspondent, 5 October 2007, Business Times Singapore 2007 Singapore Press Holdings Limited