We were lucky to catch up with Kayla Raymond recently and have shared our conversation below.

Kayla, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I moved to Haiti after graduating from the University of Northern Iowa in 2012. I had graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the Arts, emphasis in Graphic Design and by this point in time my family had already founded our non-profit and I had my eyes on a cute Haitian guy. I was offered a job to oversee a team of artisans making jewelry for a company based in Iowa, so that’s what really allowed me to jump full in and move to Haiti.

Once my feet were a little more settled, I began connecting with other companies that were providing extremely necessary jobs to people in need and creating a beautiful selection of jewelry, ceramics, accessories, purses, etc.

I also eventually married that cute guy I had my eyes on and through a series of other wild events gained custody to three beautiful children. My small job with the artisans was no longer paying the bills for the household I found myself running. So, I began dreaming up ways I could build a business that would support my family but also support the amazing companies I was connecting with. My firsthand experiences were teaching me that job creation and opportunity for Haitians was some of the most important (and least talked about) work, but I wanted in!

So, I began looking for places to rent along the main highway connecting the capital, Port-au-Prince, to the beaches in the north. There was only one road to and from and the village I was living in was just a couple miles down on a bumpy, dirt road. In 2014, I found a two-story house and we rented the top level and opened up shop. The name “Rosie’s” is in honor of a goddaughter I lost in November 2013 to pneumonia; she was just 13 months old.

When I started Rosie’s, I was buying products from 5 to 7 different companies that were already well-known in the country. There were no boutiques or “tourist stops” between the capital and the beaches so we became well known quickly as a great stop for visiting groups (many of them being short-term mission groups). We also found a great to place to source Blue Bunny ice cream in the capital so we also became a bit famous for our milkshakes (a sure treat on those hot Caribbean days!)

Not only were we offering a relaxing atmosphere for visitors, but we were passionate about speaking into job creation and the importance of investing into Haitians on a wholistic level, not just through short-term hand-outs. It’s something I remain beyond passionate about today and truly a hill I think I’ll die on. I’ve seen so much damage and harm done by foreigners who come into the country full of promises and resources, only to leave behind broken promises and people left in trenches of poverty, injustice and oppression.

Kayla, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I grew up in Midwest Iowa in a middle class family and honestly experienced most of my life in a bubble of privilege. It wasn’t until my dad took my family on a trip to Haiti in the summer of 2009 that my world was flipped upside-down. I had never witnessed poverty on such an extreme level nor interacted with people outside of my culture (aside from a trip to Mexico in high school to an all-inclusive resort, but I don’t even know if that counts!)

As Haiti continued to steal my heart in many different ways (I ended up marrying a Haitian, so ya know, it was a whole affair) I had to deconstruct all my first-world perspectives. I ended up graduating from college with an art degree, moving to Haiti and wondering how in the world I would ever be able to use my creative gifts.

After two year living in Haiti full-time, I dreamt up a business plan to open a boutique that would feature 100% handmade goods, produced by multiple different companies already existing in the country. I knew I didn’t want to recreate a wheel that was already turning, but I was seeing first-hand how important job creation and dignified work opportunities were to families in such dire situations. Finding secure incomes is nearly impossible, so Rosie’s exists as a business to promote these products so more families can have opportunities to an income.

In 2017, two friends of mine came up with the idea to hand-stitch greeting cards and the project could employ two to three women. I soon saw the potential in this little project and began putting my design skills to work. Today we employ 32 women full-time through our greeting card initiative and our entire line is designed exclusively by myself. In 2018, I was also connected with a group of artisans that create paper from vetiver, banana leaves and other remnants. I wasn’t sure how I could incorporate the paper into our greeting card line, but I did discover I could run the paper through a printer. So, we now also have a full line of “banana paper creations” which are also exclusively designed by myself.

I laugh at 2012 me every once in awhile, because I wasn’t sure back then how I would ever use my graphic design skills, but now my business has grown into an opportunity where I get to design something new almost every day whether it be for product development, marketing or the website. I was reminded the other day by friend who runs one of the companies we partner with that everything comes back around in this work because it’s eventually always brought back to the core of who we are.

I think Rosie’s is a reflection of who I am individually but also a reflection of the beautiful country of Haiti and her people. I work really hard to source and showcase a beautiful assortment of goods on our website. I see it as a “collection” as I piece together different products from each company but also fully acknowledging that each individual piece is a story all on its own with a mama or papa behind the product striving to rise out of the struggles one faces daily in Haiti.

Our slogan for Rosie’s over the years has become “the way you shop can change the world” and I really do believe that with all my heart. I think if every single person decided to intentionally purchase just one thing with purpose a month, or even each season, we would see an entirely new world and artisans/makers rising to places of genuine, hard-earned, much-deserving stability.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

My business partner is my mom! While there are definitely days she drives me crazy, I do genuinely love being in business with her.

I came up with the idea to open Rosie’s in Haiti about six months before my wedding. She thought the idea was great, but a bit much at the time. We were planning my wedding and simultaneously gaining guardianship of my youngest daughter who had been abandoned at a nearby orphanage. She told me I couldn’t take any serious next steps until after our wedding. We ventured off on a honeymoon in southern Haiti and I began looking for houses to rent about two weeks after returning from our honeymoon. Our wedding was January 4, 2014 and we had our grand opening to the boutique April 2014!

Things really took off well in Haiti and about a year later my mom began dreaming up what it would look like to open a Rosie’s in our small town of 3,500 people in Northwest Iowa. There was no local coffee shop nor fairtrade gift store. So many people were already aware of our non-profit and the work we were doing in Haiti, so we had a good hunch it would go over well!

Back in college one of my projects was to design an entire branding board for a coffee shop. My mom had always joked about the idea of a “sit-a-minute” shop because our society is always in such a rush and her desire to create an atmosphere where people truly came to “sit a minute” I ended up running with this idea and based my entire project on the “sit-a-minute” brand. Staying true to that theme that all things have a way of coming back around to us, my mom opened Rosie’s “sit-a-minute” in August 2015.

We would run our two businesses separately for about two years and then eventually merged them into one because it made more sense for buying purposes, inventory, etc. My family and I ended up having to leave Haiti late 2019 due to the violence and I’ve been working out of the back of Rosie’s in Iowa ever since. I launched our website late 2018 but really began diving deeper into the e-commerce world and pushing online sales when we moved back to the States.

We had to unfortunately close the doors to the boutique in Haiti during the pandemic. The combination of the violence and unrest in Haiti plus the pandemic and no one traveling anymore made the choice impossible yet easy. Thankfully our years in Haiti, serving people from all across the States gained us a pretty large following and we’ve been able to replace website sales with the sales we did in Haiti.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

The question above kind of leads me into answering this question.

In late 2016 I was realizing we were running out of room in the space we were renting. By this time we were producing greeting cards with a team of six ladies, needing more storage plus the cafe side of things were going so well we wanted to expand and offer more. I spent 2017 raising funds to purchase and build a building of our own. We called it the “expansion” and it was truly a dream come true. We had a spacious kitchen, we even came up with homemade salsas, fresh tortillas and the best breakfast taco you’ll ever have in your life! My manager, Hermanie, is one of the most talented ladies I’ve ever met. She was overseeing the production of the greeting cards, handling quality control and payroll and then I found out she’s an amazing cook and baker – we were an unstoppable team!

Business was at all-time high when we opened the expansion in March 2018.

June 2018 we saw record breaking sales and were so anxious to see what the entire summer would hold and summers held the highest traffic with visiting groups. But, everything took a turn for the worst in July 2018 as the president announced a rise in gas prices and people took to the streets to demonstrate. It really was the turning point that has led us to the downfall that we see in Haiti today.

I’ve wrestled so much with this. Why would we arrive to a moment where we tasted and saw how fruitful this business could be for it to all kind of be slammed back in our faces. We closed the doors to the boutique exactly two years after opening them. We bought the land and built this amazing space, but for what?

The greeting card team still meets there weekly, but it still seems so minimal compared to what it was capable of. So, I still don’t know what will happen with this space in the future. I know what it’s capable of doing and the people is can employ/serve, I just also know it’s not going to be any day soon until it comes back to life.

Which leads me to where moving to America and working out of the back of our store here (in the freezing cold – it’s literally (-15) degrees out right now!) was a pretty big pivot in how I saw me running this business for so many years. But, so many good things have come from it, too. Being in America, allows my children to have so many more opportunities (we have six kids now! Three adopted & three biological) and from a business stand-point, I can do so much more work here than there is even to do in Haiti right now, too. So, while it’s heartbreaking to be apart from Haiti and the people we love there, we fully embrace that being Stateside is where we need to be right now.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rosiesboutiquehaiti.com
• Instagram: @rosiesboutique.haiti
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Rosiesinhaiti

Image Credits
all images are by Lauren Neal