I’m excited to write that Stop Traffick Fashion is in the news again! We were featured in the business section of the Cincinnati Enquirer today. We’ll be at quite a few events around Cincinnati throughout the fall so we’ll be posting those dates once they are finalized!
A trip to Thailand in college introduced Emily Hill to human trafficking.
Nearly a decade later, the Walnut Hills resident has stepped into the front lines to help fight it. Her online boutique, Stop Traffick Fashion, sells fashionable handbags, jewelry and body lotions made by women who have survived or escaped sex slavery and human trafficking situations.
Hill came face to face with modern-day slavery when she taught English at an orphanage in Thailand. She heard of girls aged 9 to 18 who had either been forced into hard manual labor or servitude, or had been sold as a sex slave.
In poor villages surrounding the orphanage, Hill met parents who were duped into selling their children into slavery. They thought they were giving them up so they could have a job and a better life.
“You just become paralyzed by all that knowledge,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t let my life go on in the same way.”
Hill wouldn’t stay paralyzed for long. She spent several years reading all she could about human trafficking, learning about the organizations that spent time fighting it and attending and volunteering at events to build awareness.
After two years working for downtown’s Modeling Group in its London office, she asked to be transferred back to Cincinnati. It was time for action.
Earlier this year, Hill started Stop Traffick Fashion. She contracted with a Web developer to build an e-commerce site, www.stoptraffickfashion.com, where she could sell products made by survivors of sex slavery and human trafficking.
“I’m not a social worker. I can’t rescue these girls,” she said. But she recognized that performing labor - learning a skill and making money to support a family - helps build their confidence.
“They don’t want to just be a charity case,” said Stephanie Voorkamp, a director for California-based Freedom Store, a project of the Not for Sale campaign to abolish modern-day slavery. “They want a job. That gives them opportunity and hope.”
Selling the fruits of their labor let Hill contribute in some way.
Hill buys products at wholesale costs from organizations like Voorkamp’s that employ these women. Jute tote bags come from Freeset Bags in Calcutta, India, where women have been saved from prostitution. Cambodian women who have suffered from exploitation and domestic abuse work at Hagar Design making silk handbags and tote bags from recycled rice bags. Victims of prostitution work for Night Light in Bangkok crafting jewelry.
Hill even buys product made by women who have escaped sex slavery situations in the United States. For Not for Sale, they make hand and body lotions.
Products range in price, but Hill has worked hard to find items that are affordable. Jewelry is $20 to $80, handbags $19 to $75 and bath and body products around $20 a bottle.
The hardest task for Hill is marketing her site while maintaining her full-time job. She’s scheduled a handful of trunk shows around town for the remainder of this year. She hopes to eventually add apparel and men’s products to the site, though it can be hard to find manufacturers that are both fashion conscious and make items of good quality. A storefront in Cincinnati could come down the road as well.
It’s Hill’s passion that has impressed Jane Tafel, president of Hagar USA, an organization that provides trauma counseling, shelters and investigative services to victims, as well as literacy education and vocational training.
“What has drawn her to the product is the mission behind it,” Tafel said. “It’s a very strong motivation for her to make a difference through this company.”
For now, Hill is focusing on promoting the cause with each sale. She wraps each item by hand and ships in nice packaging, with detailed information about trafficking and ways to get involved.
“I want it to be a specific shopping experience, like a boutique,” she said. Hill doesn’t necessarily want to target activists, rather fashion-conscious women with social awareness.
She hopes to use Stop Traffick to generate a new set of activists.
“The most important thing is that more people find out about it. If I can use Stop Traffick to make that happen, that’s success,” she said.
