Yeah Can’s team have been involved in Hope Center since December 2010. It’s their favourite non-profit. Such amazing people. The current involvement is with handicraft product development. Not something Yeah Can have been involved in before. So it’s all new territory.

The current excitement is around developing a bangle. This came up by chance as the team at Hope Center mentioned that they have many cardboard rolls left after garment production. Those are the cardboard insides left after the fabric roll has been used up. Hope Center has a lot of those left over after uniform manufacture.

Then somebody else said why not use left over cuts of the A Luoi hand-woven fabric and we could have a win win situation. Two lots of recycled left-overs to be sold at practically 100% return. Very good business sense there.

That lead to a bunch of different width bangles made using bits and pieces of fabric. At this stage during prototyping only one sized diameter is available which of course fits only one range of wrists, mostly thin and smaller people. Trying them out on tourists showed the first short-coming.

However, the positive has been that Vietnamese young people love these bangles too. this means that there will be a local market as well. This is hugely exciting as it means that the shop will not have to depend on tourists for this particular product.

Team Yeah Can is quite optimistic about this product range for the new shop. There is a campaign page for funding required to set up this retail space. Please help with a small donation and get your free eBook at the same time. 54 beautiful images of Vietnam. Definitely worth having.

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PostCard Design by Designer Kyra

When Yeah Can took on the Hope Center in Hue Vietnam as their social responsibility programme they didn’t imagine that the development of handicraft products would be one of the tasks they would get involved in. But it certainly has.

The strategy session with Mrs Hong the Vice Director in charge of the center plus two deaf artisans  with team Yeah Can was a fun event and much was discussed. It was decided that there would be four definite product ranges.

There would be continuous development for recycled wire products. The first new product would be the decoration of the very Vietnamese coffee filters. This new product would be added to the existing bowls, hand held mirrors, picture frames and jewellery items.

Further jewellery items would be a series of bangles using the hand woven A Luoi fabric. The first prototypes have been made and a lot of enthusiastic attention was given to these lovely new products. Even the local population loves them and it seems this new product will have appeal with Vietnamese shoppers as well.

The third range will be a development of paper products starting with greeting cards. These will have designs printed faintly on the cards and will be hand painted by the artisans to create a more handicrafted look and feel. There have been some slight problems with quality of manufacture and the process might need to be changed slightly to accommodate the skills of the disabled artisans.

The final product range to get started will involve bead work. This will be in the form of beads added to the greeting cards as well as used in jewellery production.

It will be interesting to see how the product development will move forward. One thing is for sure, Yeah Can is having fun at the same time as giving something back to the universe.

And by the way. Check out Yeah Can’s design for the fund raising campaign for Hope Center’s new shop. And while you are there, do consider a small donation. Every bit counts.

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