Of all the red-letter days in a calendar year, World Refugee Day is the nearest and dearest to our hearts. In a big way, it’s a day for GAIA to do something special in honor of the 65 million people around the world who have been displaced due to violence and oppression and celebrate their resilience. On a more personal level, it’s a day for us to celebrate the resettled artisan women who are the very reason GAIA exists.

This year, World Refugee Day fell on June 20. To mark the occasion, we partnered with another local socially-minded brand Mon Amie to host a fun event at our new headquarters.

Mon Amie is a division of Fossil, which is also based in the Dallas area. The name is French for “my friend,” and the company is certainly our friend — and a friend to many women worldwide. It shares our style-with-purpose mission. While we work to empower resettled refugee women and girls through well-paying, meaningful employment, Mon Amie empowers women and girls in developing communities around the world by helping provide access to food, water, education, health care, and business opportunities. So when the like-minded folks at Mon Amie reached out to us with the idea of a pop-up event, we were definitely on board!

Together we packed the GAIA house for a Wednesday evening of snacks (that was indeed a macaron tower!), sips, and a special craft workshop headed by Huda and Bothina.

Visitors browsed the watch brand’s summer styles and all the GAIA goodness we have to share, while Huda and Bothina led the group in a #CreateForaCause workshop. Social media influencers, including Lee Cordon, Denise Johnson, and Stephanie Drenka were among our many lovely guests who made tasseled key rings to take home.



It was such a fun way to celebrate World Refugee Day — and kick off summer. Everyone who attended had a blast, and all agreed that they found a new appreciation for the handiwork our artisans do: It’s a whole lot harder to make a tassel that's built to look pretty AND built to last!