Barrett Ward is first to admit he is not an obvious candidate for a GQ award: He is a 5-foot-6-inch Nashvillian with graying hair who relies on his wife for basic fashion opinions.
So it was not as an icon of style that he was celebrated at the GQ Gentleman's Ball last week, but as a founder of fashionABLE, a social enterprise that helps Ethiopian women escape poverty and prostitution through sales of hand-crafted accessories. The magazine each year honors men supporting important causes around the world and features Ward in its latest edition as a Leader Award recipient.
'Let's be clear, I've never done anything else like this in my life,' he said, joking about the red carpet photo shoot as he sat behind a mug of coffee and a stack of colorful, hand-woven scarves. Still, he welcomed the recognition the award has brought to his enterprise and the women behind it. ' I was encouraged to see that GQ was using their voice to truly celebrate and raise awareness around doing good in the world.'
Since launching in 2010, Nashville-based fashionABLE has partnered with groups of Ethiopian women who make scarves, leather bags and bracelets, either helping create the businesses or buying products from organizations already underway. For the women making the accessories, the opportunity means being able to support their children and family and avoid a dangerous sex trade that had previously been their means of subsistence.
For Ward it began with a mission trip to Peru in 2001. At 31 he took a break from his job as a district sales leader at Southwestern and saw for the first time what poverty really looked like. He describes watching a young girl outside a tin shack splashing her face with dirty water to clean off, and recognizing his life was out of balance in terms of priorities. He calculated what he paid for his prized Lexus three weeks earlier - the ultimate definer of his success - and realized 300 homes could be built with that sum.
Ward left his corporate job, spent two months in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and South Africa and began working as a project coordinator for African Leadership, a Brentwood nonprofit that provides relief and development for African communities. With a 75 percent pay cut, his Lexus days ground to a halt.
At African Leadership, Ward began Mocha Club, a response to college students' frustration that it was difficult for them to have an impact on large-scale problems with limited resources. The initiative called for $7 contributions each month - or the cost of two mochas - which could put two children in school for a school term or provide clean water to seven people for an entire year. By the time Ward left his director role last year at Mocha Club, there were more than 10,000 members giving various amounts.
Barrett Ward, middle, is founder of social enterprise fashionABLE. (Photo: Submitted )
While running Mocha Club, Ward met his wife, Rachel, whose job at an adoption agency led them to live in Ethiopia in 2008. There, he repeatedly saw young women waving at him on the street and discovered the widespread commercial sex trade. As he researched ways Mocha Club could help women out of prostitution, he met many women who had turned to the industry as a last resort to help their families. One woman, for example, had entered prostitution to help care for her sister suffering from breast cancer.
'I think I came in with an impression of what a prostitute was,' he said. 'What went from women who were possibly living salacious lifestyles, were women who were heroic beyond any measure that I had ever imagined, women making extraordinary sacrifices for their children, for their families to do whatever it took to support them. When I asked them what they wanted, consistently, you heard them say, 'We just want an opportunity, we want a job.' '
At a market in Addis Ababa, he saw his wife purchasing scarves as gifts for others and began crafting a business model that would help create alternative opportunities for those women.
In 2010 he worked with an Ethiopian business, Ellilta Products, to train three women to weave scarves, and through Mocha Club's website they sold 4,123 scarves within three months. FashionABLE was born to focus entirely on accessory sales as a separate enterprise, and four years later, the scarves business has grown to 30 women who have sold 50,000 scarves through the enterprise. The brand has expanded to bracelets made by women in the Entoto Mountains who are HIV positive, as well as clutches and bags made by women working at Modern Zege, also in Addis Ababa. The accessories are sold online and in several retail outlets in the Southeast, including Whole Body, Castilleja, Philanthropy, Spruce and Boutique Bella in the Nashville area.
FashionABLE does not own the Ethopian businesses making the products. Instead, it helps the women develop skills and scale their operations as it generates demand for their products from Western retailers. While many social enterprises are built primarily around charitable giving and allocate a portion of proceeds to provide goods for people in need, fashionABLE focuses on supporting jobs. It's not that charity isn't needed, but job creation offers a more lasting solution, Ward says. Helping women in particular find economic opportunity has a domino effect on helping a community, as women tend to reinvest their earnings back into their communities.
Barrett and Rachel Ward on the GQ red carpet. (Photo: Submitted )
'If we are to be serious about solutions to poverty, we have to be creating new jobs and creating them for women,' he said.
Ward is a father to three young girls, two of whom he and Rachel adopted from Ethiopia. Hearing him describe the work that fashionABLE is doing and the adoption journeys of his now 10-year-old and 3-year-old daughters, it's difficult to imagine Ward as someone who once defined his success by an upscale car or who focused too much on himself. In fact if GQ is honoring admirable gentlemen doing good things in the world, Ward fits the bill precisely.
Where to buy fashionABLE products:
Online at livefashionable.com
Whole Body in Hill Center, 4021 Hillsboro Pike
Castilleja in Edgehill, 1200 Villa Place Suite 112
Boutique Bella in Park Place Shoppping Center, 2817 West End Ave.
Spruce in Brentwood, 7028 Church St. E, Suite 101
Philanthropy in Franklin, 432/434 Main St.
Reach Jamie McGee at 615-259-8071 and on Twitter @JamieMcGee_.
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