The Lidia May team works hand-in-hand with the Lidia Hope Centre, a non-profit organization working to support over 400 families in the urban slums of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Through the Centre’s Embroidery Artisan Training (EAT) program designed by Lidia May, underprivileged women are trained as embroidery professionals, giving them the tools to ensure a flexible, sustainable, and dignified source of income generation.
The Lidia Hope Centre Primary School operated by the organization has provided educational opportunities to hundreds of children since 2010, ensuring a nurturing learning environment and providing assistance in the continuation of their education.
On an individual level, we want to see our women Artisans take concrete steps out of the slums and into the skilled labor market. Our ambition for the industry is to be a leader in sustainable and responsible production of luxury goods.
Our staff volunteered with company support to conduct talks, safety demonstrations and to hand out free hand-soap and information flyers in the early, panicky stages of the Pandemic. We also raised donations and distributed food packages to help nearly 5000 marginal families during lockdown. Coming together as a community to support one another other meant everyone was a little better equipped to deal with the crisis.
Whilst our teammates were busy helping others they couldn’t help but be a little worried about their own jobs given that our online sales had fallen by 90% between January and March of 2020. Lidia May’s founders committed to protect every single job and guaranteed income security for all employees. We executed a calm, structured migration to WFH regime to reduce uncertainty and stress and we kept everyone occupied by using the time to invest in one-to-one counseling, team-bonding exercises and job-related skills training.
We participated in a Stanford-led project involving doctors and scientists all around the world and leveraged our own expertise in high-end product design and manufacturing to create Very High Performance, low-cost PPE for front-line workers.
Lidia May stands at the forefront of raising awareness via interviews and op-eds about how fashion must change to become more inclusive and more ethical in its treatment of the workers in producer countries and of the natural environment in which we all live.
