SMALL BUSINESS: Sisters In Trade

Deale stumbled into her business when she was on an overseas trip. A native of South Africa, she had owned a corporate-gift company there before immigrating to the U.S. with her husband in 1997. When she went back to visit, Deale saw beautifully detailed embroidery made by Zulu craftswomen. "I just knew people would want them here," she says. Although the women have "extraordinary natural talents in beading, weaving and stitching," she says, the Zulu artisans were either illiterate or barely educated. She discovered that many of their husbands had died of AIDS, which has ravaged the country. "Many of these women are holding their whole family together," says Deale.

She partnered with four existing businesses that produced embroidered linens, hand-embroidered baby garments, beaded handbags and jewelry, and she imports the products through her two-year-old company, Jacaranda Living, which is based in Wellesley, Mass. Deale's best-selling category is waffle-weave cotton towels, and she says her nautical designs sell well among the Cape Cod set.

As she developed her business, Deale was passionate about improving the Zulu women's living standards. Many of the women she employs were skilled artisans with limited markets for their wares. Others, who were unskilled, received training. The extra earnings have helped them, as sole breadwinners, support their families better and raise money for medicine for close relatives with AIDS. (Deale says according to two of her suppliers, at least half of their workers have family members who suffer from or have died of the disease.) What's more, the crafts work allows the women to stay at home, where they can care for their families, instead of traveling to labor in factories. According to Deale, the women earn good wages, by South African standards. She won't discuss how much they make but says she has given them raises twice in the past two years. "I've developed a market for them. I knew if I could sell their products here, I'd be making enormous strides in helping people who would otherwise be unemployed," she says. "When I give them a nice big order, they have a lot more work to do, and they're going to get more money."

Funding a Family Dinner

EVEN BEFORE ENTREPRENEUR PAULINE Lewis decided on Vietnam as the source country for her embroidered handbags, she wrote a nonnegotiable directive into her business plan. Her company, Oovoo Design, would work with only women-owned businesses and female artisans. "I wanted to know that the money I was giving back would go directly into the hands of women," she says.

Lewis was burned out when she left her corporate marketing job to start Oovoo. The Malaysian-born entrepreneur traveled to Vietnam to investigate opportunities there. She was stunned by the styles in one of the handbag shops she visited. Less than a month later, Lewis was back in Vietnam, meeting in Ho Chi Minh City with the retailer, a woman who had a group of embroiderers working for her in many villages north of Hanoi. The two women partnered up, and designer Le Thi Hong Tu agreed to create a new line for Lewis, act as point person and oversee the embroiderers. Some 500 of them now stitch the bags' panels in their homes, and 120 other sewers complete the bags in Ho Chi Minh City. Lewis got the first samples in hand in July 2004, and she sells her bags to about 300 boutiques across the U.S.