Monika Nowaczyk’s motivation for launching Cambodia Knits was straightforward: she realized a social enterprise could better accomplish her mission to empower women in Cambodia, compared to an NGO.
“When you have money, you can choose which of your family’s needs are met,” she tells us. “How can we possibly solve this problem for these women who are being left behind? I wanted to do something that they could do at home.”
Today, Cambodia Knits produces eco-friendly, hand-knitted toys sold internationally through its sister brand, Beebee+Bongo; and locally for a growing boutique and original design manufacturing (ODM) market. It is Cambodia’s only safety-certified toy company, providing sustainable, flexible employment to over a hundred women from four provinces in Cambodia.
The company was recently recognized for its positive example as a “green” manufacturer, in the recently-concluded EuroCham Cambodia ESG Awards Gala last 20 November. Cambodia Knits won the SME Diversity, Equity, and Social Leader Award, “for outstanding contributions to promoting diversity and inclusion through fair labour practices and empowering local artisans”.
In this interview, she shares her experiences, lessons learned, and the ongoing journey to scale Cambodia Knits while uplifting working women across the country.
Can you give us a short overview of Cambodia Knits and its advocacy for women in Cambodia?
Cambodia Knits is aspiring to be a fair-trade social enterprise that provides economic opportunities for women through fairly paid, home based artisan production. We provide all of the training and materials, so women can work from home on their own schedules around their own needs at home.
Not everyone knits all the time. We do give them flexibility, like during the farming season or fishing season.
We give them a formalized contract, so they are able to access employee benefits. They have all the protections of the national labor law. They signed up for the National Social Service Fund (NSSF). They also get benefits like free national health care, maternity leave, and get funded into the newly established pension fund.
What do your employees make, and how are you selling them here and abroad?
Beebee+Bongo is our global brand. Cambodia Knits is our Cambodia manufacturing company, that also does ODM and makes other lines. We strive for our products to be as eco-friendly as possible. Our toys are predominantly aimed at children – from newborns to maybe seven to nine years old.
We have a line of stuffies. We have educational toys that are intended to be multi-use and also grow with the children. They come in multiple colors, and are all about play based learning. We also have a temple collection, which is our Cambodia-based line of toys that are inspired by Angkor Wat.
We have branched out – we do dog toys now, made with upcycled ropes, strings from hoodies or sweatpants that are discarded from the garment factories.
We also do ODM – we produce for other companies, either their own product lines, or like a bespoke product for a company, whether it’s for their marketing or for them to resell.
How did you personally get started on your advocacy for women in Cambodia?
It was a combination of several factors. I had worked in the NGO sector before this. I recognized that NGOs are not the solution to development. They’re not sustainable in many ways.
In one situation, I saw that if there were two villages, and one village was receiving maternal care support and the other village was receiving educational support, if you were in the wrong village and your needs weren’t met by the NGO, you were out of luck.
When you have money, you can choose which of your family’s needs are met. You don’t have to wait for the NGO to step in. I recognized that in my own life, if I have funding and resources, I can do the things that are needed for my family. How can we solve this problem for women who are being left behind?
I noticed a lack of opportunities for women in a certain age group and in certain vulnerable communities. They didn’t have an opportunity to finish school, and they’re constrained by their situations at home. Even if they could get a job, they often cannot keep it because they cannot work set hours – because there’s always something at home!
So I wanted to do something that they could do at home. And having been a knitter and a crocheter, having heard of other similar projects around the world, I thought, “Well, why don’t we train up people, make some products, and sell them?”
I always tell people, I didn’t come into this with a very strong business mindset. I think also our solution is not a business solution. Our solution is a solution about social needs. Since then, we’ve had to adopt a business mindset. I’ve learned not to dislike the idea of profit. Profit is not a bad thing.
Was that a conceptual hurdle for you in any way when you started out?
Yeah. Business, to me, meant guys in suits who make money at the expense of the environment and people. So learning about that intersection of social enterprise, where you can run a business for good, I thought, “Oh, wow. You know, not all businesses are evil.”
In the end, businesses create jobs. Jobs enable people to have money, send their kids to school, fix their teeth, and all these things. Now that I’m a business owner, I really fight for profit and for sales.
Speaking of sustainability, if I remember correctly, you make a point to make Cambodia Knits’ materials and process as sustainable as possible. Why do you specifically aim for this, and how do you practice it in your production line?
For the sake of the future of the planet, I think we all need to make decisions that maybe are harder to work and a bit more expensive, but are made with the future in mind.
Knitting and crochet tend to be naturally low impact because they don’t require electricity. There’s no wastewater. There is some small waste from the ends of the strings. But in relative amounts, it’s quite small. For the dog toy line, we are reusing pre-consumer factory waste – so that’s taking stuff out of the waste stream.
Are Cambodia Knits’ products on track to be FairTrade certified?
We were provisional members of the World Fair Trade Organization (WFTO), and next year we will go back into that process. We had resource challenges in meeting their reporting criteria a couple of years ago, so we paused our membership, but we want to make sure that we can do it right.
Why does it matter for Cambodia Knits to get that certification?
First, it provides a symbol of trust to potential customers. For some brands, it opens up buyer channels, because there are some buyers who will not buy unless they see the certification.
Also, the ten fair trade principles help us know what to do in our operations and processes. It’s very easy for anyone on the ground to say, “yeah, we’re fair trade”, but actually, they may not be.
We were part of another program, with an organization called Nest, out of the US. Through them, we learned about time motion studies. We were able to reassess all of our piece rates, and they gave us a tool for how to measure out the averages.
We found that for some products, we were overpaying the government minimum wage in the garment sector, when most of our products were just fine with maybe like ten, 15% more than the average. And for other products, we realized, “we’re really too low here and we really need to raise the labor cost for these.”
These are why it’s important to go through those certification systems, because despite your best intentions, when you really look at your systems and your policies and how you do things, you actually aren’t fair trade!
It’s like a tool for self-accountability.
Yes. And guidance. Both those organizations, WFTO and Nest, provide a lot of resources and tools for their members, or people who want to be members, to check themselves.
How does Cambodia Knits develop the product line, and what are your best sellers so far?
The very first sleepy animal was actually because my daughter did not sleep easily. When she was a newborn, I thought, “maybe if she had a doll that had sleepy eyes, it would help her sleep.” It wasn’t actually me, but it’s our team who designed all the animals.
Our design process is really looking at a product that we think would be useful for the market, especially when it comes to educational toys that utilize the skill sets of our team, and their crochet and knitting skills. And then we throw it out to the design team and they do a few versions of it.
How many employees do you have now?
Our office-based team is 12 people. Half are doing office admin; the other half are for production – design, quality control, packaging, labeling, and sales.
For home-based producers, I think we have about 120 people on our roster. We have a handful of home-based knitters in Phnom Penh, but we also have them in four different provinces, with the majority of them in Siem Reap.
Can you share any stories of how your knitters have been able to improve their living situation as a result of working with you?
There was a woman who worked with us for many years. When we formalized, we were able to give everyone access to the national health care system. A few months later, she had a bad back injury; she needed surgery that was fully covered under the government health scheme.
If that had happened to her before, she would not have been able to afford it, or gone into debt to pay for surgery. Or just live in pain.
Could you be more specific on the benefits and the salaries that you provide your knitters?
It depends on how much they are willing to work. Some of our knitters are earning $30-40 of extra money a month. Our most prolific knitters are earning in the low to mid hundreds.
In addition, they get maternity leave. if they’ve been working with us for a year, we pay them 50% of whatever they have earned on average in the past six months. Twice a year, they get something called seniority pay – an extra 15 days of salary paid out in June and December.
And we also pay into the pension scheme, so when they retire, they will have a small pension.That government scheme is brand new, they just started implementing that two years ago.
What do you plan for Cambodia Knits in the next 10 years? What goals do you hope to achieve?
Our main, clearest goal is scaling growth and further impact. We want to have 1,000 women sustainably employed through our company. The main way to achieve this is through our high-quality products being sold around the world.
