News from WithIt.Inc

WOW LEADER
Stephanie Odegard

Interview by Alexia Rouquette

What I've learned is that things work really well for me when I go that whole nine yards and find out who everybody is that I deal with. Rather than just have buy/sell commitments with people I have nothing in common with, I work with the people that I really trust, and only in that way can I really think that we are improving people's lives. I try to work with the people who are the owners of the facilities or factories or production centers, and I try to understand if they're really interested in the people or if they're only interested in orders and making money.

What we do in Nepal is all sustainable for the most part. The industry there is very compact because the wool comes from Tibet on foot, on donkeys, on yaks, or by people. Then for a certain part of the way it comes on trucks to Nepal, which is actually very close to Tibet. We use a lot of vegetable dyes and those are gathered around the region. The carpets are washed in Switzerland to protect the water supply in Nepal which is very inconsistent. That's where we get into a little bit of trouble with our carbon foot print, because Nepal is landlocked the only way to get carpets out is by plane. So of course we try to make big shipments at a time.

1.75% of the purchase price of what we buy goes into the RugMark� Foundation. My suppliers put in .25%. So two percent of the total price of each rug goes into our foundation. This pays for regular inspections of my looms and ensures my rugs are labeled with a unique number so anyone who buys one can trace it back to the person who made it and know their carpet was not made with child labor. The rest of the money goes towards RugMark's schools and rehabilitation center.

When we sign somebody up for RugMark we have to clean out all of their facilities and generally we get the children in our rehabilitation center from that process. Most of these children are really working like slaves. They don't get or see any money. They've never gone to school. When RugMark takes them out of a factory they go to our rehab center for an accelerated education program before they're placed in one of our 13 schools. RugMark pays for their education for the rest of their school life. Since we started in the late 90's we've indirectly and directly affected about 7000 children in Nepal.

All my life I sort of had this yearning to go overseas and help people who were suffering in other parts of the world.

I did have a mentor, he was an Italian working for the Industrial Development Organization of the UN (unido.org) while I was working in the Peace Corps (peacecorps.gov) . He mentored me into the UN and definitely helped me to see how it could be done, how I could continue international social development work related to my particular skills in product design, development, and marketing. He was a good source of inspiration and ideas about how my work could fit into the global development of traditional craft products and marketing.

I definitely have a style that's a little less corporate than most companies. Everybody says that. We just gave awards to many employees who've been here over ten years, and there are even people that have been here for 15 and more. We don't have a huge turnover rate. Definitely people like it here. It is a different style. I try not to hire and fire too quickly, I try to move people until I find the right place for them, I tend to give people a lot of leeway to learn their own lessons. And I know that's less corporate than many others, so it's really my own corporate cultural style.

My interest in the arts, and my creative side - which is a huge part of business, creating the designs and styling the collections - that's something that I got from my childhood and my family. Everyone in my family was interested in music and in painting and art.

Going back to my very first job, I worked for Dayton Hudson Corporation (now target.com) in Minneapolis. I worked for some very fine fashion leaders when I started training there as a buyer. They were mentors in a different way.

When I developed my first little collection, I rather naively took them to New York and decided to start a business. My idea was always just to work on the designs and production and maybe sell to some designers, but being a woman, nobody paid attention to me, so I really couldn't get stared without opening my own showroom. And so slowly I was able to do that.

I don't think ever in my life I thought of myself as being a woman in a man's world or whatever. I just go for it. I never really thought of the carpet business as being male dominated, because I really didn't know that much about it. I do realize now that that's the way it is, very much so. It is a man's world, I have to tell you.

I sort of look at the world as one big production center. The home furnishings industry is a place where we can use this opportunity to our advantage, not only with new and unique products but also being able to employ gads of people. And if people are eating and they're well fed and they're producing and they're proud of what they're doing we're going to have a lot less terrorism and poverty in our world.

I hope more than anything that everyone who works for me takes pride in what they do, and that they see other people take pride in what they do, what they have, what they sell, and what they work with. Many people tell me how great the people are that work for me. I hear it all the time. This is a very happy place.

Handmade. I don't carry any products that aren't handmade. I don't use anything in my showroom that isn't handmade by my suppliers. We make everything - our desks, the fabrics for our chairs, we buy natural fibers to cover our windows.

I don't really have anyone I bounce day-to-day plans and problems off of, other than a couple of very close girlfriends and maybe my brother. They sort of know what's going on in my work life, they remember bits and pieces and will sort of put things together. The truth is, though, I don't have a lot of sounding boards. I think that's one of the difficulties I have personally faced.

At this moment I am particularly interested in the problem in Tibet. I've already started to do some work up there, working with the Tibetans and the Chinese together to create sort of a new look at what they're doing with the wool industries. Aside from that, I certainly am interested in looking at areas in the Middle East, and I dream of someday going to Africa. So those are learning areas that I'm interested in.

STEPHANIE ODEGARD is founder and president of Odegard, Inc. and a director of the RugMark� Foundation.