The Dawn of Good Threads

This blog will focus on the impact of Good Threads.  I will write about the impact we have on our employees, on the community we work in, and the foundation we are partnered with.  The desire to help these people is why we started Good Threads and continues, to this day, to be the main reason we keep putting in the work to make this business successful.  I believe exactly what we do for these people can be hard to communicate, and I hope that this blog helps everyone better understand our impact.

One of our top employees, Christina, stitches a belt at the foundation while cuddling her baby. Chrstina is 27 years old and has three children under the ages of 7.

As this is the start of the blog, it seems appropriate that I tell you about the start of Good Threads.  My name is David Palmer, I am 27 years old and have been living in the Dominican Republic since January 2010.  In 2010 I founded the Joan Rose Foundation, a development program dedicated to giving children access to opportunity and basic necessities.  We provide food, education, clothing, medicine, legal documents, and emotional support for 110 children daily. Good Threads provides a child at the Joan Rose Foundation with 3 meals a day for an entire month for each belt sold.

Since starting the foundation three years ago, I have consistently been bothered by the lack of work available for most of our children’s mothers.  As you can probably imagine, most of the children at our foundation come from single mother households.  Ninety percent of the kids at our foundation were born to Haitian immigrants.  Haitian women have virtually no job options in Esperanza, the city in which we work.  Due to discrimination, their illegal status and a lack of education, most formal jobs are not available to them and the informal jobs are inconsistent and low paying.  These women are by and large extremely hard working.  They are not impoverished and unemployed due to laziness, some sense of entitlement or a lack of responsibility.  They simply have almost no opportunity to obtain a legitimate, consistent, decent paying job.  

Since I started the foundation, I have been trying to find some kind of job that these women could do.  During the winter of 2012 a buddy of mine told me about needlepoint belts and how they were quite expensive, growing in popularity, and extremely labor intensive.  At the time my knowledge of needlepoint was literally zero; I had never even heard of it.  I started doing some research and came to the conclusion that this might be what I had been looking for.  

My younger brother, Timmy, was at the time working in the finance industry.  He did not feel fulfilled by his job and was dying to start a business that helped impoverished people.  He had recently graduated from Princeton and had written his senior thesis on how business was helping the poor help themselves.   

I told him about my idea and he loved it.  My time was limited and training women how to make needlepoint belts was going to fill my plate.  Timmy took on the whole American side of the business- the website, sales, marketing, etc, and I started trying to make a needlepoint belt.  It was not easy and we went through a lot of prototypes before becoming satisfied with our product.  We currently employ 22 women, most of whom have children at the Joan Rose Foundation.  Seeing the improvement in these women’s and their families living conditions, self esteem, and their increased independence from men, who tend to be abusive, has been incredibly rewarding.  

Timmy has since left the business for the military and Omar Eid, a childhood friend of Timmy’s, has taken over his role.  We continue to grow and experiment with new ways to help our employees help themselves.  I will be posting every week or two and look forward to sharing more of our story and impact with all of you.

Co-founder, David Palmer, and a few of his best workers.