Oliver, Ivory & Ganador

What it does

Oliver, Ivory and Ganador are innovative vending bags, created to improve the living conditions of the poor market vendors. This project is created in collaboration with the locals, their weaving skills and recycled materials.

Your inspiration

Poor Filipino vendors don't have any shop to display their goods, but use plastic bags or the typical tobacco baskets to show their food. Carrying all this to the market and back home is a tough job. Besides that, they are also struggling with demolition. There are more than five thousand vendors and not enough regulated space to let them all vend legally. Vending demolition happens on daily base, taking or damaging goods of the vendors, mostly of the poor because they aren't able to get away in time. I was confronted with this struggle during my internship, which motivated me to help these vendors.

How it works

The vending baskets, created in different sizes is an improved version of the tobacco basket that they are already using. With the extended weaving, it’s possible to take along and vend a bigger amount of goods. It’s not only easy to carry it from home to the market and back with the carrying straps, it also helps them to transfer fast to another vending place, when there would be danger of demolition. The basket is also lockable with extra straps, to protect the goods from falling out. These baskets are co-created with the locals, using their weaving skills and recycled materials. This product raises awareness about demolition and recycling, to help and support the Filipinos in their daily life and struggles. These vending baskets can also be used in other contexts or environments. You can use it as a storage bag at home, a clothing bin for dirty clothes, as decoration or just as a backpack. Whatever fits your needs.

Design process

After visiting, observing and interviewing the market vendors, the creative process and idea generation could begin. In order to help this target group in their daily routines, I wanted to find a solution with the existing products they use and keep the cost as low as possible. These two conditions were important to smoothly implement the product locally. After consultation and brainstorming with my local organizations, we chose to develop an improved version of the existing woven baskets they already use to vend at the market. We chose to work with weaving techniques and recycled materials to achieve this result, but this brought a lot of challenges. These vendors must be able to carry a lot of weight and it needs to be sustainable, so the strength and sturdiness of the product is crucial. Solving this by using only weaving was a trial and error process. After several tests we found a folding technique to close the weaving that makes it very strong. This does not close in the same direction, but the strip is turned three times and triangularly closed. The carrying ribbons were also resolved in this successful way.

How it is different

These aren't just baskets: they're a product with impact that is locally produceable and raises awareness of the social struggle facing Filipinos. Of course, there are a lot of existing baskets that can be useful for this purpose, but they are not not affordable or available to them. Waste is a huge problem in the Philippines. The population isn't aware of the effect and behaves accordingly. Interest in recycling only appears when there are economic advantages attached, like creating product with waste materials as their livelihood. Therefor, it is important to invest in this kind of project, financially and practically, by motivating with new ideas, opportunities and projects. Filipinos and their attitude of mind is totally focused on export market, not on their own needs. Besides that, they all make the same products, what makes sale difficult. Creating new products together, both useful locally and internationally, will boost their creativity and give more chances long term.

Future plans

With this project, we are hoping to start a sustainable and honest collaboration between north and south, to boost the local economy, to create jobs and to support their livelihood. With presenting this project local and international, I want to raise awareness about the local struggles Filipinos face, which will be important to achieve change in the long term. It would be fantastic to be able to starte a small company with these products.

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