All right, Well, it is the season of giving. We're getting into it in a real way. Let's take a minute to think about how we're doing it. Jessica Haniger is here with me, Back with me, founder and CEO of Noonday Style, author as well. She's based down in much warmer Austin, Texas, but lucky for us she's here, maybe not so lucky for her in the frigid Northeast. Great to see you, It's great to be back. All right. So this is so timely, obviously, which is part of
the reason that you're here. But I do feel like here in and this goes back to a conversation we had in this studio. People are being a little bit more thoughtful, more holistic about what they're giving, where they're sourcing their gifts. But the question is how do we
actually do that. You've got an answer. Gifting is so personal, and when we can gift something that is handmade and has a story and a connection to it, I think the gift receiver not only receives that gift, but also gets to receive this story that goes along with that gift.
And what's so powerful is we're primarily an accessories brand and so when you're able to give a handmade accessory made by a woman in another country through Noonday Collection, you actually empower that gift receiver to become a storyteller for that product as well, Right, because we all love to be able to tell someone something about what we're wearing, or what we're reading or or whatever it is. So remind us how this works, sort of how you created
this network and what it looks like. Yeah, So Noonday Collection is a socially responsible fashion brand and we're creating meaningful economic opportunities for people around the world. We partner with thirty artists and businesses and some of the world's most vulnerable communities that have traditionally been left out of the marketplace, and we create a marketplace for these beautiful handmade goods. And we do that through a network of
social entrepreneurs that we call Ambassadors. So it's a direct selling model. So we're creating economic opportunity for women across America. These women gather in their homes, they have their friends, gather friends in their homes, and they are stylists and storytellers who gather. They earn an income while making an impact on these artists and partners, and so tell me a little bit more about the artisans themselves. How do you find them, because obviously they're not necessarily just easily.
You can't just pick up the phone. Yeah, necessarily. I know you travel a lot, so we do you do it. We're nine years in and so we have been able to scale businesses that might have started off as boutique, small mom and pop shops. But we've come alongside these businesses and we have helped them with upfront capital, We've helped them with collaborative design, We've partnered with them over the long term, and so now we have a name
in the marketplace. A lot of the ways we find people now is they it's inbound people come to us. The outbound is more if we're really wanting to make an impact around a certain social issue. So for instance, the Burmese and Thai border, we have been able to work with a small group there that works with refugees um that have come out of Burma, and now they're
making small, little porcelain gifts for us. And we start small with people and we might try one skew see how it does, and then we slowly scale back in the day when it was just me in my living room. We I first started with a young couple Jollia and Daniel, and they were a mom and pop artisan small group, and we scaled them. Now they have a hundred full time employees. So that process of how we partner and find people has changed as New Day Collection has scaled.
I do love the idea that we throw around the term mom and pop and in your case, like you literally are talking about like moms and pops. Yes, I am in a very specific and literal way. So talk to me a little bit about this sort of broader trend of ethical giving, because you know, whether it's talking with someone like Dana Thomas, who was on our show earlier this week, who's just wrote a book called Fashionopolis, like we're thinking a lot more about where things come from.
Is that a sort of permanent change? Do you think? Like? Is that one of those things sort of like once we learned we started to learn about where our food comes from, we started to be more mindful about that. Is that same sort of thing happening in apparel and accessories? You think right now? Absolutely? And I feel like Noon Day Collection has been one of those brands that has led the way once you know you can't unknow and when you realize that you can actually use your purchasing
power to affect change. Not just make a donation to a favorite charity, but how can you have drive those dollars into a way that's empowering other people to start their own businesses. That is, it's a powerful tool that
a consumer now has. And yes, in the same way that the food industry has become much more transparent farm to table, I do believe there is a slow fashion movement, a movement, a conscientious fashion movement, where people are willing to make more mindful choices around how they're going to
spend their dollars. Well, it was interesting to hear Dana Thomas talk about this too, because she was saying, you know, it's not just about looking at the label, and this goes to your point of storytelling, like you sort of got to go underneath it a little bit because listen, there are sweatshops in l a and in Texas and probably New York, uh right near here as well, so sort of really understanding the story behind it, and people
do to your point, sort of appreciated story. I mean, it is a counter narrative in a lot of ways to this like quick, superficial, you know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Life that we lead wanting to know that narrative a little bit more. There isn't a lot of transparency around the supply chain in the fashion industry. I think it can be a little bit overwhelming for a consumer, which is why Noonday Collection really leads with not what we're against,
but what we're for. And we're for creating empowering economic opportunities through artisan crafted goods that are made with fair trade principles. All right, we are Bloomberg, So I gotta ask you your business growing? It's growing, Yeah, yeah, we have. We grow through ambassadors. We grow through New Day Collection ambassadors, and we have more ambassadors this year than we've had last year. So I'm on here to let the world know about this amazing business opportunity. To where can they
check it out? Noonday Collection dot com. All right. Jessica Hanager is founder and CEO of Noonday Collection. Here with us in New York City. She is spreading the word, leaving the warm confines of Texas to join us here in New York City. We really appreciate it's always also the author I should point out it's a really terrific book. I was able to get a copy of it. Imperfect Courage Live a life of purpose by leaving comfort and
going scared came out in It's really terrific. Also a great gift idea for this holiday season.