Julie Colombino-Billingham on Building Deux Mains and Creating Jobs in Haiti

0:00Hey, I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you'd like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so did I have Julie Columbino-Billingtonham on the line, and she is a humanitarian entrepreneur and founder of Dume and author of From Lost to Legacy. Julie, welcome to the show. Hi, it's so great to be here Adam, thank you. All right, so we've got a lot of talk about here today. Of course, you have a book from Lost to Legacy. We got to get it, and we have to talk about, of course, Dume and the great work that you're doing over there in Haiti. And I guess just to get started, how does this company do, like, how does that come about? Where'd you get the idea for this? Well, I'll tell you, it wasn't a traditional business idea. I was a disaster responder, and I don't know if you remember the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, but I just played, yeah, I know it's hard to forget, isn't it? Well, I deployed 10 days after the earthquake hit, and I was doing my normal logistics

1:04and disaster response activities, and about a few weeks into it, I was distributing bottles of water in a tent camp, and a woman said to me, hey, I don't want any water, but I need a job. And it just really transformed who I wanted to be and how I wanted to work in Haiti in the kind of life I wanted to have. You know, I always definitely believe in aid and nonprofits, and especially after a disaster, we can't neglect the immediate needs of people in crisis, but I wanted to be a part of the generational change in the long-term stability, and really the thing that was hitting me was not just the earthquake damage, but the poverty that was plaguing Haiti, and I wanted to be a part of changing that and working with the people of Haiti to find a solution to the poverty that was plaguing people. When you say deployed, where you are part of a program, what exactly are you doing, so I'm clear. Yes, it's quite unclear to be honest with you, because I had traditionally, during Hurricane Katrina, I worked for the Red Cross, and I worked in the United Way, so I worked really

2:08large agencies, but I actually decided to do this one on my own. Wow, so you just learned? What was that like? I mean, based on your background, I'm sure people, your friends, your group, your family they knew, they're like, oh, there goes Julie, she's off again to save the world to a certain extent. I mean, a good way, of course, I mean, but I mean, like, what did people say? You're like, I'm going to go for my, I'm going for my own, what did they, what was that like? Oh, it was crazy. You know what's so funny, though, my sisters have me saved in their phone as save the world, Julie, because I knew it. Ah, stop, I knew it. I already knew, I called it. I know, when you said that, I was like, oh, I know that name, yeah, it was a silly thing to do, and definitely not something that disaster responders would ever approve of or recommend for someone to go off without an organized agency. But you know, the truth is the story of this disaster for me is I just felt this really strong call to be in Haiti, and I had some disagreements with the way that some of the

3:08large agencies did things in the past, and I just wanted, I don't know, something in my soul just said, do things differently. So it was very intimidating, I was very scared, I always try to let people know that, I was not because I was a brave woman that went off on Haiti, I was kind of this, you know, Oh, yes, are your saved the world, Julie, don't even try it. No, I was, I was petrified. I was petrified. When the plane landed in Port-A-Prance, there were very few airlines that could actually air-crafting land because the runway was all broken and torn down. There was no facility, there was no people to have the plane landing, it was chaos. And when the doors of the plane opened, some of the Americans who were in Haiti when the disaster hit ran on our plane, and they were covered in blood and dirt, dust, and wearing face masks, and it was extremely intimidating. And I thought, what in the world do I think I'm doing here, you know, if this was insane. And then I really realized that these people were the lucky ones because they were getting

4:09on this plane and they were leaving, but there were millions of people on the ground who had nowhere to go, and we're inspecting people to be there to respond. And so I just kind of held my breath and got off the plane. Wow. How does this turn into a business? Like what point was that, okay, I know you said the woman said like she needs a job, but at what point did this turn into the seat of an idea that turned into a business? Where do you see that? If you remember, was it progression, was it like an aha moment, when did it turn into a business? You know, it was a little bit of both because while I was in Haiti, all these things were dripping on me about long-term development and people needing jobs and people asking for jobs and people wanting to work, and it was something very different that I had experienced in this disaster versus previous disasters where usually in the developed world, people want to recover naturally and do the things to get their things back on track. But here, people just wanted to work begging for jobs. And it was just a very different experience. So this was all dripping on me for a few months.

5:12And then I met a woman named Jolena De Roche. She was very passionate about job creation. She's a Haitian woman who lost everything her and her husband lost their home, their businesses, everything but thinking it's not their lives, the lives of their children. They were all spared. And I met Jolena and she just said, you know, she wanted to create jobs in her country. And I had remembered when I was a missionary in Africa in 2006, this kind of just came back to me in a dream that people were making and selling sandals out of tires. And so I just kind of said this crazy idea to Jolena and she said, well, there's tires everywhere and no one has footwear and kids need shoes because they step on a rebar and they get illnesses from the soil and we should do that. We should do that. And Adam, we did it. We, in August, it was August 14, 2010, about eight months after the earthquake, me, Jolena and three other women decided we were going to start this little business and make sandals from tires. Wow. What was, and so you were, you're there, you're making sandals from tires, like what

6:15lin just to be clear, have you ever done anything like this before, like entrepreneurial, humanitarian entrepreneurs? You were, is it, but it's entrepreneurial, like you're going in the, in the community, you're solving a need and you're making it happen, have you ever done anything like that before? No, you know, no one's ever really asking you that before, but no, I haven't actually, you know, I always... What made you think you cut? What made you think you cut? I'm so interested. Oh my God. You know, I honestly don't know, you know, because I think the truth is there was no choice. You know, when people have this resiliency and this passion and this desire to do something and what I had was I had, you know, buyers in America. So, you know, people on Haiti were so poor, we didn't really have much of a customer base, but I was meeting all the other disaster responders and geoworkers, there were thousands of volunteers coming in. I was living in the same camp as these guys, so like I was making connections. So it was like between the Haitian team and their craftsmanship and my connections. I was like, okay, we can solve something, we can do this, we have to do this. There's no choice. We have to do this.

7:15And I think when something also was a calling, it's just, you just do it. Hmm. So where does the company stand today, like talk to me about how it's evolution throughout the year? Did you stay in Haiti by the way, are you located in the US again, or I'm just curious in that end, too? Yeah, of course, I live in the US now, I live in Haiti for five years, and then I traveled back and forth. I haven't been to Haiti in the past 16 months, not sure if you know that much about the current situation, but the president was assassinated about four years ago and since that time, gangs have taken over. And so about 90% of the capital is run by gangs, the airport is actually closed, it's been closed for 16 months, so you actually can't fly into port apprentice even if you wanted to. So the entire business is run by the Haitian leadership team in Haiti, and they risk their lives every single day to go to work, and they are the true heroes, like the brave true heroes of this story. How resilient, right? Yeah. I mean, they're absolutely incredibly, you know, really learned about the kind of woman I wanted to be by being and living in Haiti, because just experiencing this for myself.

8:20And to answer your other question, I can tell you, we are no longer making tire sandals. Because this company has evolved over the last 16 years, but what we do make now is school shoes for Haitian children, so we make a leather, like almost like a fairy chain for little girls, and like a little, it almost looks like a church shoe for little boys. And we distribute those through churches, NGOs, missions, we're trying to get government contracts so that all children in Haiti can have, you know, proper school shoes. And we export premium leather bags into the states and we sell it places like Nordstroms and small boutiques in our own website. So we were really passionate about not only making a product for export to tell us amazing story of talent in artistry in Haiti, but also for something for local consumption. So we do, we do both. How do you, when it comes to writing a company, like under what you just mentioned, like what's going on in Haiti, like how do you even do that? Like I mean, normally when we're asking a question, when we're asking a question, okay, like tell me about leadership challenges, tell me about all of that stuff seems kind

9:22of trivial compared to just keeping it going and keeping people focused and the keeping the hope there. Like how do you even, from your end being in the United States, how's that even accomplished? Yeah, it is so difficult. I remember like three years into this venture. I had a community in Orlando, Florida, who was like really, really helpful about helping us get started and really supportive. And it was part of the Chamber of Commerce and they were like, Julie, I really think you should be a part of this CEO group. And I was like, okay, so I would, you know, Skype in the meetings and people would talk about the challenges they had. And I would just sit there thinking, man, I don't belong here. You know, my team hasn't had water in 40s and we haven't had electricity in a week. And, you know, we have a hurricane coming and no shelter, you know, half a team is still living in tents. It was really hard. It still is really hard to even compare with people who are running businesses in the first world, but we try to do it with dignity and grace. And it really is its co-leadership, you know, so I get, I mean, the truth is I get down

10:23a lot. I don't always have all the hope and all of the enthusiasm to keep going. But somebody else in the team will have it and we pick up for each other when someone is selling low. And that is kind of one of the revolutionary things about the way that the company is running the values of the company, is that just everybody is so invested, you know, we co-own it. So it's a co-owned company, so there's just a lot of passion from each person to make sure it works and to make sure we all have what it takes to make it work. I'm curious about how something like this scales, like how you initially made the connection to selling the premium leather bags in the United States and how you kind of introduced that, like how that come about and how does this scale, like how do you continue doing something like this, which you've obviously been doing, but how do you continue? Well, you know, sales is our biggest challenge. You know, every day there's people asking for new jobs and I just, my answer is always the same. Not until we scale sales, can we create more jobs? So right now we have about 50 craft people working and there's 5,000 more that we could

11:25easily pull it up if it needs to be there. So scaling is definitely the biggest challenge. The way that we have made some of the big headway that we have is through partnerships making getting the factory fair trade verified was huge trust because once we became part of the fair trade federation, people were like, oh, this is really interesting. There's a company that's making beautiful things. It's a kind of like an anomaly because people don't think beautiful premium leather, lush, chic bags. When I think of Haiti, they think of poverty and gangs and earthquakes and all these things. We wanted to really flip that story, which is why we really focus on a premium product. And because of that and because we stand up so much, I think people are willing to give us a chance on Nordstrom getting into them. That just happened in July of last year and that was a game for us. You know, at 3X sales, they opened us to this community of women and buyers that never knew we existed and I can't compete like from an advertising dollar perspective with

12:26a lot of these big brands. So, you know, having these kind of smart partnerships is what saves us. That's absolutely amazing. I love it. It's a great, great story. One that I'm happy to bring to my audience and Julie, so nice to meet you and to have you on the show. This is amazing. Oh, thank you for asking such a nice question. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'm just amazed. I'm going to Julie saves the world in the title on this one. I tell you this year is enough. It's a big name, the podcast. I don't know. Oh, they're going to hear the name of her segment. You know, and as a recurring guest, we saved the world. We saved the segment. I love it. Oh, my gosh. This is a lot of fun. How do Julie, how do, for some, it's been great having you on the show seriously. How do people follow up? How do they grab some bags? How do they support? Like, how do they get involved? This is my favorite question because every single person with purchasing power has such a chance to make an impact in the world and change someone else's life the way that they purchase. So if anybody is interested in, you know, looking at a new leather bag or a small leather

13:30bag, they're good. We also make products for men. Please visit our website, which is Zuma.com. It's D-E-U-X-M-A-I-N-S. And Zuma means two hands in Creole because we make everything by hand. And we would love to offer anybody that checks us out and wants to buy something at 15% discount. You know, please use the code Adam15 and get a little discount and enjoy some really well-made spare trade leather goods from Haiti. I love it. I love it. This will be great. And for publicity, you know, we'll definitely put some, put the information in the show notes, including the discount code. So Adam15, get your discount there. I love it. I mean, and speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven't done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Yes, you heard me right daily, each and every day bringing you new content and new ideas and hopefully new inspiration helped you along the way in your journey as well. Also, hit that subscribe or follow button in Julie. Thanks again for coming on the show.

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