Just in time to round out your last-minute holiday shopping list: The Little Market launches a custom collection from GAIA!

We’ve been biting our tongues for months, dying to tell you about the day Lauren Conrad and her team came to our office in Dallas to design the collection, meet our refugee artisans, and see how we make magic happen. We wanted to wait until the collection was live, and now it’s time to spill the beans!

It started back in the spring, when the folks at The Little Market reached out to us. They wanted to know all about our company, our process, our materials — everything — really digging in to what we do to make sure that the GAIA mission and The Little Market mission were aligned. In case you don’t already know, The Little Market is a non-profit, charitable organization and online fair trade shop founded three years ago by TV personality Lauren Conrad and her long-time friend Hannah Skvarla. Its mission is to build sustainable partnerships with artisans around the world and help them develop and sell their designs, so that those artisans have meaningful work and can support their families. (Have you ever heard anything more aligned with our mission?!)

After we completed a Q&A and both realized what an awesome match we are, The Little Market began carrying some of our goods on its site. GAIA favorites, such as the Pom Pom bag and Fold-Over clutch, as well as pillows, pouches, and Mini Heart purses, have found a home with The Little Market customer — so much so that The Little Market folks wanted to have us create an exclusive GAIA collection just for them! As if that weren’t enough, they told us that Conrad and Skvarla wanted to come to Dallas to meet everyone and work on the collection in person. For all of us, it was a thrill, and for some of the gals on our team — those who have been huge fans of Conrad since her OC days — it was one of the highlights of their year!

There’s nothing like a guest of honor to inspire a little sprucing up, so we cleaned and painted and rearranged a bit.  And since Conrad and Skvarla wanted to meet all of our refugee artisans, and most of them work from home, have childcare responsibilities, and don’t have transportation, it took some coordinating to get everyone into the office. But we did it!

It is so rare that we are all together in one place, and it would have been a wonderful day just for that reason, but having Conrad and Skvarla in our space, talking with everyone, designing with us, and taking lots of photos and video for The Little Market website and her own blog, was a dream! They couldn’t have been warmer or more gracious with the team and our refugee artisans. And we couldn't be more excited to finally tell you about this collaboration.

Read Conrad’s post about her visit to our office and shop The Little Market.