Press
The Examiner.com - November 14, 2009
Stop Traffick Fashion Makes Shopping Meaningful
By Tamia Stinson
Stop Traffick Fashion founder Emily Hill
Shopping for a cause has to be one of the best ideas, ever. At least, that’s what Emily Hill hopes. Hill is the founder of Stop Traffick Fashion, a retail site dedicated to raising awareness about the horrors of human trafficking and providing a place for fashionistas to shop for stylish goods created by trafficking victims.
The Cincinnati native graduated from Miami University with an MA in Economics and currently works for Nielsen in addition to acting as the president, buyer, blogger, and media contact for Stop Traffick Fashion, which launched this past summer.
“I wanted to hand-pick products and sell them to a new set of consumers to raise awareness.”
Her passion for the cause was solidified on a trip to Thailand while in college, when she visited a school for high-risk young girls in danger of becoming victims of human trafficking. “That brought it home for me because they were your average 12-year-old girls.” Over time, she became more deeply involved, and at an industry event she noticed some of the vendors sold products made by survivors of trafficking. That was when the initial idea took root.
Running the business
Emily runs Stop Traffick Fashion mostly on her own, with help from friends and family as needed. She works directly with organizations with offices and distribution in the US, buys the products wholesale, and people are paid fair wages for fair trade products. She also donates a portion of her sales back to the organizations.
Most of the inventory resides in her home, where she’s “set up a little area for packing and shipping.” All orders are carefully packaged by hand with attention to detail. She hopes to add new lines and carry clothing soon, and eventually open a brick-and-mortar shop to sell products.
“I try to stay focused on success of Stop Traffick Fashion as awareness, not necessarily the business side.” For Hill, the most rewarding part is when people become more engaged in the cause and try to make small changes, “When I can get people thinking about what they buy and where it comes from.”
Changing the way we shop
She advises gradually making adjustments to your shopping habits. “Start by investigating some of the sites that provide information about the consequences of trafficking and the companies who participate in this practice, and think about what you can change.”
You can check to see which companies are on the watchlist at Free2Work.org, and visit Chain Store Reaction for a list of companies that may play a part in the exploitation of fellow humans. The Stop Traffick blog also has a page of resources to consult. “Organizations out there need our support.”
Emily notes that organizations need monetary donations as well, since economic empowerment is a very big part of rehabilitation for victims of human trafficking. Funding leads to teaching people job skills, which leads to confidence, which leads to hope.
“It’s amazing to see how much hope they do have.”
Shop online at Stop Traffick Fashion and visit the blog at Stoptraffickfashion.com/blog.
Theresa Flores was drugged, raped, photographed and blackmailed into commercial sex when she was 15.
Human trafficking is the world’s dirty little secret according to Emily Hill, who has met survivors in Asia whose parents sold them into slavery.
“It’s estimated to be about 27 million people enslaved around the world,” Hill said. “I just knew in my heart I had to do something.”
Hill started a business, called Stop Traffick. She works with international charitable groups to market jewelry and handbags crafted by women who were rescued from prostitution and slavery.
“They’re paid a fair wage to make these products, so that they can create a sustainable income for their family and they won’t be at risk for being trafficked again,” Hill said. “To be a part of that hope that they have and give them that opportunity, it’s really a good feeling.”
Hill sells the goods online.
More Information:
Woman Battles Human Trafficking With Website (click this link to watch the video)
Home for Emily Hill is a posh condo in a nice part of town, but six years ago this activist was in Thailand. She was teaching English and met children from impoverished homes.
“One of the places we visited was a home for girls who were highly at risk of being trafficked. They were ages 9 to 18,” said Hill.
She visited poor villages and saw firsthand the faces of human slavery. Young girls who were sold as sex slaves.
“It was just horrifying to me and I knew then that I had to do something,” said Hill.
At first Hill was overwhelmed. She couldn’t believe how some parents would voluntarily allow their kids to be taken away.
“Men or women would go through the villages and talk to the parents and say, ‘hey, we know that you don’t have a lot of money. We can take your daughter to the big city; get her a job as a waitress, a model.’ They don’t tell them that they’re going to be slaves,” said Hill.
But Hill said that there were some parents who knowingly sold their children to slave traders just to make a few extra bucks.
“[The children are] forced, they’re raped, they’re beaten, they’re locked up. It broke my heart, and I think I just knew my life couldn’t be the same,” said Hill.
So a few months ago this young entrepreneur launched an online boutique selling handbags, jewelry and lotion from women who have been given a second chance at life.
Products sold on the Web site are made by survivors of prostitution and trafficking in India.
Each purchase from Hill’s Web site Stop Traffick Fashion directly helps survivors and organizations that help with rehabilitation.
“If we could increase the distribution and awareness of these products, then that’s a really valuable way to support the cause.”
A cause Hill will continue to fight for until every child is safe at home.
Hill is planning another trip to Southeast Asia next year. She will be visiting Cambodia to talk to survivors of human trafficking.
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.
Cincy Chic - August 12, 2009
Written by Linda Palacios, on 12-08-2009 07:20
Accessorizing Against Modern-Day Slavery
You’ve seen car-stopping couture before, but can fashion stop a different kind of traffic — human trafficking? One local woman says it can, and she has the plan to make it happen. 
As the beautiful women that we are, naturally we are attracted to other beauties — whether it’s a handbag, a necklace or a brilliant sunset. Cincinnatian Emily Hill decided to take her admiration for beauty a step further by creating the beautiful out of the downright ugly — the human trafficking industry. This disturbing industry made more than Google, Nike and Starbucks combined last year alone, according to the film CALL+RESPONSE . In June, Hill launched Stop Traffick Fashion, an online boutique geared toward raising awareness of human trafficking while supporting victims of the tragic reality as well as the organizations that help the victims.
“Rescuing [the victims] is only part of the picture because most of them become lured or sold into trafficking because they are very poor, so if you want to stay out of that, you need to have a sustainable income and feel like you’re a valuable person again,” Hill says. “So part of that is giving them job skills, training so that they are economically empowered and can provide for their families.” Therefore, the boutique features the fashionable creations of survivors of the human trafficking industry so that they can make a fair wage in hopes to become self-supporting.
One of Hill’s main goals for the boutique is to cater to both activists and non-activists with a boutique that makes people want to buy the products because they like them, not just because they want to support a cause. “Basically, I’m trying to take those existing products and commercialize them in a new way to reach a new target audience. Basically that fashion-conscious, socially-conscious woman, and hopefully, in doing that, raise awareness to a new set of people who will become a new set of activists for the cause,” Hill says.
Stop Traffick Fashion sells merchandise from several other organizations. Each of these existing groups works directly with the survivors to train them in some sort of craft, and the organization helps market and sell the products. These
organizations include Freeset and NightLight, which sell bags and jewelry made by escapees of the sex trade of Calcutta, India and Bangkok.
While many of the products are made in Asia, Hill recently started buying lotions and soaps from Not for Sale, a global organization that supports modern-day abolitionists. Handmade by modern-day American slavery survivors, the lotions and soaps are products of Thistle Farms, whose tagline includes “Freedom starts with healing, and love can change lives.”
Hill wanted to work with this particular organization to reinforce the idea that slavery is not just an international problem. Human trafficking is happening right here in the land of the free. In fact, both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children have cited Toledo, Ohio, as one of the top cities in the 
United States for trafficking children into the sex industry.
Beyond the online store, Hill maintains a blog on the site to help raise awareness and give readers some guidance as to how they can help work toward a solution. Also, Hill gives trunk shows upon request. Generally, the trunk shows include around 15 women, but she is open to nearly any size group, she says. The trunk shows feature various facts to get people’s attention as well as a video and stories of survivors. Hill also brings some products through which guests can browse or buy.
To learn more about Hill, her efforts and how you can help, visit StopTraffickFashion.com.
PHOTO CREDITS
Photographer: Amy Storer-Scalia
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