After Hours 8.1.22
Discussion 12: Inspired by Nature - Human and Environmental - with Heidi Ledger
This month's Q&A gets us closer to Thread Spun founder and lover of all things textile and terracotta-related, Heidi Ledger. Heidi is a mom of three with a background in social services that drove her to start a brand employing former refugee women. A hobby making surfboard bags has transformed into a social enterprise and sustainable women's boutique in her hometown of Encinitas, California.
Photography by Jess Ballerstein of ByDarius Photography
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Heidi, where are you from? How does where you grew up influence Thread Spun?
I am a desert girl originally from Phoenix, Arizona, and I grew up playing Roxaboxen amongst the saguaros and sagebrush and frying eggs on the blacktop in summer. Yeah, that's really a thing we did. To be honest, it took leaving Phoenix at age 19 for me to really learn to appreciate the desert and its gifts. I moved to Toronto on a whim for university and it completely changed my path in life.
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Living in a really diverse and vibrant urban environment was so completely different from how I had grown up - and I fully embraced city life and its many cultural gifts. Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the entire world, and that is reflected in the social and cultural fabric of daily life there. It's a pretty magical place. When I think about "growing up", I think about Toronto - because this is where I really found my footing and started learning who I am and who I have the potential to be.
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I think Thread Spun as it exists today is influenced equally by my early childhood in Arizona and my young adulthood on a lake in Canada: it is a deep appreciation for childhood memories searching for Gila monsters under a hot and endless Arizona sunset, reverence for the rich Diné and Hopi craft traditions, and inspiration drawn from treading through wash beds after a monsoon rain - just as much as it is the deepest of leafy greens in High Park in Toronto, an ode to fresh falafels at midnight and the fragrance of a panang curry, the gorgeous song that is standing on a busy street corner surrounded by languages and ideas different from your own.
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At Thread Spun, we carry a diverse range of home goods, gifts and apparel from all around the world that are made sustainably, because we respect and honor people and planet equally. How and where I "grew up" are a huge part of this. I hope our customers can see inspiration drawn from nature - human and environmental.
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Photography by Jess Ballerstein of ByDarius Photography
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So how did you end up in San Diego?
I left Toronto to attend graduate school in Colorado and I was there for a few months before I figured out it wasn't the right fit at the time. I started applying for jobs in the nonprofit sector. A few weeks later, I happened to get a call from a previous internship with a refugee resettlement organization here in San Diego, asking if I would like to interview for a job. I moved here shortly after that and settled in North County, but drove all over San Diego helping recently arrived refugees find jobs. I ended up going back to graduate school at the University of San Diego, studying Peace and Justice - and working in resettlement for five years. In the meantime, I met my husband, and this became home.
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Photography by Bella Glickman
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You've spoken about Thread Spun being a social enterprise retail store. What is a social enterprise?
Simply put, a social enterprise is a for-profit business that operates with specific social objectives. Maximizing profits is not the primary goal of a social enterprise but rather serves as a tool for funding social causes. In my opinion, a social enterprise combines the best parts of traditional nonprofit organizations and traditional for-profit organizations. When done correctly, a social enterprise business is able to be mission-driven in a way that is more financially sustainable and predictable than a nonprofit organization.
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We are a social enterprise because we support only brands and artisans that are creating products sustainably, with respect for eco-friendly production practices, fair wages, and the long-term health and well-being of workers. We utilize eco-friendly shipping and packaging and contribute to carbon credit offsetting programs. We ensure all of our employees receive fair wages, provide a supportive working environment, and give at least 5% of all of our profits to charitable causes and mutual aid funds.
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Photography by Jess Ballerstein
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So, Thread Spun is mission-driven. What is your mission?
At Thread Spun our mission is to offer goods produced sustainably as the term relates to both people and planet. We believe in paying fair wages and supporting fair trade and human rights, and this applies to our local employees as well as all of our vendors. We know that we have a responsibility to protect the environment through both our business practices and consideration for what production methods we support. Form and function are important to us, but mean nothing if goods are not produced ethically. We know things made by hand are made to last, traditional production methods cause less burden on the environment, and true beauty is found in unique crafts made with pride.
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Photography by Nicole Capri of Nicole Capri Creative
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Tell us why you started Thread Spun, and how its form has changed over the years.
Thread Spun started as a brand, not a store, and our first product was surfboard bags. I had just had my first child in 2015 and had decided not to return to my career in resettlement. I remained close, however, with one of my first clients and her family, who were originally from Burma but had lived for decades in a refugee camp in Thailand. When they came to San Diego, they experienced many barriers to integrating into the local community and to securing employment. People arriving to the U.S. as refugees and immigrants are hindered from securing good jobs by a lack a transferable skills, language, and poor public transportation infrastructure, among other things.
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Pleh, our first employee, and her family had been "warehoused" (a term used in resettlment) for decades in Thailand, which means they had been restricted to the area around the refugee camp and provided very little educational or employment opportunity for many years. Despite this, Pleh and her family were, and remain, extremely resilient people with a rich tradition of hand-weaving textiles on backstrap looms. When Pleh was having a hard time finding fair wage employment in San Diego, I suggested that I pay her above a living wage to make some surfboard bags that my husband could sell in his surf shop in Little Italy, Atacama Surf. We utilized handwoven textiles created by women still living in one of the refugee camps on the Burma/Thailand border, along with deadstock fabrics.
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What started as a side hobby quickly grew as we sold more surfboard bags and expanded into other accessories and home goods. I began sourcing fabrics from artist cooperatives around the world and eventually employing more women. We still work with our local seamstress extraordinaire/artisan Lashta, who is originally from Afghanistan, to sew a limited amount of goods - but our own production was slowed by the arrival of her fourth child and my third, and the pandemic, of course.
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Following the birth of my first child, Arlo, I experienced intense postpartum anxiety and depression, and Thread Spun became my life line to the outside world and my "previous" life, and my connection to other women in a time I needed it most. That said, it became clear early on that starting and advancing a brand from scratch was going to be extremely time consuming, and that was something I didn't have at the time as I didn't have childcare or family nearby. I began thinking about creating a small store where I could have a workspace in the back for the brand, but also source and sell goods from other small brands supporting fair wages and artisan communities. When a small space on the Coast Highway 101 in Leucadia became available, I jumped on the opportunity. I created a small fair trade and handmade retail store in about 150 square feet in 2018.
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Right before the pandemic, I signed a lease a much larger space a few doors down, and my husband and I opened a separate space together up the road. Unfortunately, in April of 2020, that space experienced a catastrophic flood and we lost everything. I spent the next several months violently ill (pregnant with my third child) and sanding the floorboards of our new expanded location on the 101, while contemplating the prospect of raising three children in a global pandemic and trying to salvage my business. That next month, we lost my mother in law to cancer. This was a really difficult point for our family, personally, and my husband and I professionally. I am so lucky that we were embraced so warmly by our Encinitas and San Diego communities, and we are indebted to friends who lent their hands and hearts to help us get back on our feet. Despite my fears, the demand for handmade and sustainably-made goods and slow fashion apparel remained high throughout 2020 up until now, and we've been able to thrive in our new form. We are so proud to bring a sustainable lifestyle store to Encinitas and San Diego county.
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Photography by Jess Ballerstein
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How do you source the sustainable goods and gifts we can find in the shop?
We work primarily with small-scale sustainable apparel companies, some are run by as little as two people, and several larger apparel companies producing apparel sustainably and ethically. Many of our clothing vendors, like Jungmaven and Sugar Candy Mountain, are companies that I have personally supported and purchased from for years - which made it easy to bring in these lines when we expanded to apparel. Other vendors like Mohinders shoes, which are handmade in India, and West Perro, which sources fair trade palm hats from Guatemala, were also already at home in my closet. I love offering goods to customers that I can and do stand behind personally. I occasionally attend trade shows in Los Angeles when I can, and sometimes find new apparel vendors this way.
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I also do a lot of research online to find social enterprises and artisan cooperatives abroad that are creating unique and traditional crafts *and* paying people fair wages. Some of this knowledge of where to look and how to evaluate these organizations and businesses comes from my educational and professional background - but most of it comes from independent research and attending independent craft fairs and makers markets. Through talking to artisans themselves you will learn the most about production methods and techniques, about working conditions and fair pay for their particular crafts. Markets like Renegade Market and West Coast Craft are some of my favorite to attend as they attract artists from all over the country and beyond to showcase unique, handmade goods. However, my all-time favorite market is the International Folk Art Market in Santa Fe, whose mission is to create economic opportunities for and with folk artists worldwide who celebrate and preserve folk art traditions. The International Folk Art Market envisions a world that values the dignity and humanity of the handmade, honors timeless cultural traditions, and supports the work of folk artists serving as entrepreneurs and catalysts for positive social change. At Thread Spun, we believe this is the future of capitalism.
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Photography by Jess Ballerstein
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How would you describe your personal style?
I think my personal style is evolving every day, and is also highly dependent upon my mood - haha. I have always been a person who prioritizes comfort, so you'll rarely see me in something that is super tight or edgy, but I love color and texture. My 20's were a jeans and t-shirt era to be sure, and I spent most of my early 30's pregnant in the same pair of maternity jeans. Now that my kids are growing up a little, I feel like I am finding myself again, and that includes my style..
I still prioritize comfort, and most days I am in my favorite sustainable Thrills denim with a Jungmaven hemp tee. However, I find myself gravitating more and more toward a few elevated key pieces in my closet - a vintage huipil dotted with colorful flowers I found on a trip to Todos Santos, my floor-length handwoven tunic from Teocali, my handwoven Agnes dress from the shop. Always, always with my Olympic Jacket strewn over top, because I love a layered look. I'm really leaning into fewer, better things as I learn more and more about slow fashion - and prioritizing sustainable materials like organic cotton and hemp, along with ethical production and fair working conditions for the people who make my clothes.
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Photo by Jess Ballerstein
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What is your favorite place you've ever traveled to? Where would you like to visit next?
Domestically, I would say any state or national park in California. As for international travel, in 2010, I was able to visit Damascus, Syria. I was immediately enthralled. This was obviously right before the Arab uprisings that began in 2011 - so Damascus and Syria as a whole are obviously very different today. My heart breaks for anyone affected by violence and war, and as we all know, the civil war in Syria was extremely brutal, and the regime there continues to brutalize its people to this day..
In Damascus, I spent an entire day in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque, wandered the various gorgeous quarters - stumbling upon hidden courtyard restaurants, learned about spices I had never even heard about in the souks and met amazing people - like a Syrian-Canadian movie director who ended up touring my friend and I around for an afternoon out of kindness. After the war started, I thought about that man almost every day, wondering if he got out. Working in refugee resettlement in San Diego when Syrian refugees began arriving, I would scan lists of incoming people for his name, knowing how very slim the chance would be. I still don't know what happened to him. I would love to go back to Damascus one day and take him up on his offer to bring me to Beirut.
There are so many places I would love to see and connect with people and artisans, but I do have an upcoming trip planned for Oaxaca and Chiapas in southern Mexico that I am extremely excited about.
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Photography by Jess Ballerstein of ByDarius
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What is next for Thread Spun?
We are planning to revisit our roots - think more Thread Spun branded goods created by amazing and talented women. We have some beautiful, handwoven, vintage textiles from East Africa in hand, with plans for some fun new branded goodies made in collaboration with Lashta. We are also planning our own line of home goods made ethically in southern Mexico - and are excitedly looking forward to launching that collection, hopefully next year. We will also be continuing to offer ethically- and sustainably-produced goods and gifts right here in Encinitas!
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Photography by Jess Ballerstein
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Top Five Favorite San Diego area haunts?
1. Cleveland National Forest - My ideal weekend is spent up at Mt. Laguna and in the Pine Creek Wilderness, hiking and exploring with my family.
2. Balboa Park - I love the culture, the museums and the vibrancy - plus, if you need a little solitude, you can find that too, especially in the Japanese Friendship Garden.
3. South Ponto State Beach - this is our favorite family beach and we love to bring our fire pit down for s'mores all year round.
4. Campfire restaurant in Carlsbad - whenever my husband and I can sneak away for a date night you can find us here.
5. Queenstage Coffee here in Leucadia - the best place to grab coffee and a bite alongside a quiet place to sit outside and enjoy the sunshine.
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Photo by Jess Ballerstein
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What are your top 5 favorite songs at the moment?
1. "Deen Wolo Mousso" by Victor Démé
2. "Free" by Florence and the Machine
3. "Queen Bee" by Taj Mahal
4. "Into Nirvana" by Maverick Sabre
5. "Forever and More" by Jaguar Sun
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Photo by Bella Glickman
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Want to shop Heidi's sustainable Thread Spun picks? Click below.
