The Oaxaca Cooperative: How Our Partnership Began

In 2017, a year after we opened, Mara traveled to Oaxaca on a trip that had nothing to do with baskets. She'd gone to study natural dye traditions and came home instead with a seagrass basket bought at a roadside stand, woven by a cooperative of about a dozen women working out of a shared workshop outside the city. She wrote them a letter care of the address on a card tucked into the basket, more out of curiosity than expectation.

The letter reached them, eventually, and led to a phone call, and then to Dev and Mara both flying down that winter to meet the cooperative in person. What we found was a group that had been weaving seagrass baskets together for over a decade already, selling mostly to local markets and a handful of regional shops, with the skill and capacity to do far more than they had steady buyers for.

We proposed a standing order rather than a one-time purchase: a set number of baskets each quarter, at a price the cooperative set themselves rather than one we offered. That structure, letting our partners name their own price, has held for nine years now and is something we've never renegotiated downward, even in years when shipping costs made the arrangement harder for us.

The cooperative has grown from about a dozen weavers to closer to twenty over the years we've worked together, and they've added new basket forms, including a few shapes designed specifically for how we display them in our shop, that didn't exist when we started. We send photos of how baskets get used and styled in Hudson; they send back baskets that reflect nine years of a relationship rather than a single transaction.

We visit most winters, though not every year, and the trip has become less about business and more about seeing people we've come to know well. Seagrass itself grows locally near their workshop and is harvested and dried before weaving, a process that hasn't changed much in the time we've been buying from them.

Every basket we sell still carries a small tag naming the cooperative, not just Loomcraft, because we think the baskets should say where they actually came from. Nine years in, it remains one of the partnerships we're proudest of, and one of the ones that's changed the least from where it started.