Dream Weavers

A nation where retailing has been reduced to its basics provides valuable lessons.

Last month, I discussed my branding adventures in Hong Kong. This month provides a report on the next leg of the same trip, which yielded a radically different experience. In Hong Kong, you meet a lot of “haves” — upscale folks living well. But in Cambodia, most people are have-nots.

With an average annual income of $400, it's one of the poorest places on earth. The combination of the overflow of the Vietnam War across the border from 1955 to 1975, followed by the ruinous, infrastructure-destroying regime of Pol Pot from 1976 to 1979, has made the country a rebuilding project not for the faint of heart.

As recently as 1999, tourism to the temples of Angkor Wat was virtually impossible, but now over 2 million people per year visit the temples and stay in the adjacent town of Siem Reap, a bustling community of about 500,000 people, almost all of them focused on the booming tourist business.

While a visit to the central market of Siem Reap was fun and interesting, the retail highlight of my trip was a visit to the Artisans d'Ankor, a government-sponsored effort to recreate traditional Cambodian crafts and industries. My guide organized a trip to the artisans' silk facility a few miles outside town, which was a revelation. The project founders began by growing mulberry bushes, silkworms' preferred food. The mulberry leaves are harvested as needed and put in boxes with young, small silkworms that, in about 28 days, are fully grown and start spinning their cocoons. Twenty-one days after that, the cocoons are finished and the moths emerge. At that point, the cocoons are harvested and turned into silk.

The fabrics woven from the silk thread are sewn into an amazing variety of goods. Finally, at the end of the tour, one can go to the store and shop.

And boy, did I shop. The combination of seeing the whole process unfold, plus the beauty of the goods that had been created and the knowledge that the whole process was really helping all of the lovely people involved in the project, made me a motivated consumer. The incredible prices helped, too. I bought lots of items for friends and family, and I felt great about it — in every possible way.

The whole experience renewed my faith in capitalism as a driving force for good. Cambodia is in really rough shape, and every day, capitalism, even if it needs a nudge from the government, is making it a better place. Those of us who spend our days trying to get the wheels of big-company capitalism to move faster, better and more efficiently need to stop sometimes and understand what the true glory of capitalism is — that it's the engine that makes people's lives better.

That brings me back to the role of the independent grocer in America. While we talk a lot about the exploits of huge manufacturers and giant global retailers, the way capitalism makes a real difference is through the efforts of the remaining independent grocers that are running businesses that still look and feel a whole lot like the Artisans D'Ankor.