When the Duchess of Sussex announced this summer that she was investing in a luxury handbag brand popular with Hollywood A-listers, she spoke enthusiastically about how the company’s ‘ethical standards’ were ‘incredibly important to me’.
Yet a Mail on Sunday investigation has found that Cesta Collective – whose high-end designs sell for more than £700 a time – pays some of the women who make them as little as 10 pence an hour.
Weavers working from their cement or mudbrick homes in isolated, rural villages in Rwanda can earn as little as 82p for an eight-hour day, despite the company hailing them as ‘talented female artisans’ who are the ‘best in class at their craft’. The figure is less than half the £1.70 a day the World Bank considers as the ‘extreme poverty’ line.
Cesta Collective, which boasts of its ‘fair compensation practices’, says the earning figures do take into account women’s other sources of income and said the World Bank figure was outdated and not equally applicable to all Rwandans. The World Bank confirmed the accuracy of the figure to the MoS.
Meghan’s endorsement of the ‘incredible’ company worked wonders for its sales. When she was pictured carrying one of Cesta’s bags on a dinner date with Prince Harry last year, the company’s wealthy New York-based co-founders Erin Ryder and Courtney Weinblatt Fasciano said it led to the most profitable week in their company’s history.
In announcing her financial backing in August, the Duchess said: ‘With Cesta, I really started to understand how many women’s lives were being impacted and uplifted through their work. That was incredibly important to me.’ A feature in fashion bible Vogue followed.
But after speaking to several of Cesta’s female weavers, the MoS can reveal that:
– Workers were shocked at how much the bags sold for compared to what they earned, and said they hope for a pay rise following this newspaper’s investigation;
– Women have their meagre earnings deducted if a bag is deemed substandard;
– Some workers have to pay for the raw material themselves, and to cover transport costs to get it to their remote villages;
– They are not full-time employees of Cesta and are paid by the bag, so earnings drop if orders go down.
Until September, Cesta’s website had boasted the company was ‘proud to pay 500-700 per cent times the national average salary of Rwanda’ – a claim that was removed some time after Meghan’s investment was announced. After this was queried by the MoS, the company’s lawyers said the change came as ‘a reflection of their commitment to refining how they communicate’.
The truth is that although the women we spoke to were proud of their craft and grateful for the work in a country with a very high unemployment rate, they wished their earnings would rise.
Living in remote communities, the women use the income from Cesta to supplement what they earn by working the land with their husbands, growing bananas, beans and maize. We found some in houses with corrugated metal roofs where they live in cramped, spartan conditions with their large families sharing one or two rooms.
One group of women, working for Cesta as part of a cooperative in an isolated farming settlement in the southern district of Ruhango, worked together outside the lead weaver’s house. Another, in the northern province of Rulindo, chose to rent a small sparsely-furnished building to work from – paying the fee out of their earnings. They spoke to the Mail working shoulder-to-shoulder sitting on a roughly-woven mat which covered the stone floor.
While the climate means long spells of uninterrupted sunshine, the rainy seasons can be punishing. Several women working on Cesta bags in the Eastern district of Kayonza had to postpone speaking to us so they could salvage their modest farms from floods.
One weaver, a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide of 800,000 Tutsi people, told us: ‘We are praying that maybe they can increase our wages with time, especially if our bags fetch good profits.’
And Illuminée Bayisabe, 60, who lives in a hamlet in the valleys of Ruhango and had been weaving since she was nine, said: ‘The gap between the price [they sell for] and what we get paid is very big.’
Acknowledging that the money from Cesta had improved her life, the mother-of-four added: ‘I would hope that they can sit down and revise the prices and increase the wages a little bit especially as the economy is so tight these days.’
After taxes and costs, Ms Bayisabe gets paid 4,300 Rwandan Francs (£2.48) to weave a small crossbody bag. Afterwards. they are shipped to Italy where they are finished with leather and sell for £724.
Cesta said it is not involved in the process of setting the fees women get paid for the bags and that it relies on All Across Africa, the firm which oversees the work, to agree the prices in conjunction with the weavers.
Ms Bayisabe said it takes her and the other women she works with three days to make one, working up to eight hours a day, equating to 10.3p per hour. While her earnings vary depending on the number of orders, she said in a good month she will make the equivalent of £34.36 before taxes.
Cesta claimed that three days is how long it would take the ‘slowest weaver’ to make the bag, and that other women are faster and therefore earn more per hour. The company said it takes ‘much less than eight hours typically’ to make the bag which is not ‘uninterrupted time’ as the women have childcare and household responsibilities.
Didacienne Musengimana, 30, who works as part of a cooperative in Rulindo said she takes home the equivalent of £9.22 for a larger bag called the ‘Taco Tote’. Again, she told us that it takes her at least three days to make, working up to eight hours a day, meaning she makes roughly 38p per hour after taxes and the other expenses. This is above the World Bank’s extreme poverty line.
But the bag is sold in the UK for £863, meaning her take-home pay is just a fraction over one per cent of the bag’s retail price. Asked if she thought her wages were fair she said: ‘There is nothing I can do about it, I just have to work. I feel that we should be earning slightly more and maybe in the future we can earn more, but for now I understand.’
Another woman said the money helps supplement her income, but added: ‘I can’t say the money I get from the bag is bad, but an increase would be much appreciated.’
Their humble lives contrast starkly with the affluence enjoyed by Cesta’s founders.
Privately-educated Ms Weinblatt Fasciano, the daughter of a Harvard Medical School professor, studied at an Ivy League university and lives in a sleek, two-bedroom apartment in trendy Brooklyn with her husband Michael – a marketing director who has been an executive at US investment bank Goldman Sachs – and their goldendoodle, Pepper.
They bought the flat for £692,000 in 2017. Ms Fasciano was a marketing director at Marie Claire magazine and worked at designer shoe brand Loeffler Randall before founding Cesta in 2018.
Meanwhile, Ms Ryder was an intern at Chanel and studied at the £44,000-a-year School of Design in New York and Paris. Photographs on social media reveal Ms Ryder enjoying skiing holidays and multiple trips to Rwanda as part of her work with Cesta.
The company has been hit by critisism before, particularly over its use of images of Rwandan weavers to help promote the bags following Meghan’s investment.
British fashion influencer Georgie James said in August: ‘It is inappropriate to use these women as a marketing tactic for your brand, especially when they are not full-time employees, nor do they have any ownership of your brand…
‘These women should not be used cynically to make shopaholic western women feel better for purchasing yet another handbag, which they don’t need. That is what we call poverty porn, and it’s barely okay when charities do it. It’s completely inappropriate when for-profit businesses do it.’
None of the Rwandan women we spoke to knew much about Cesta – and none knew who Meghan Markle was. The Duchess is not understood to be involved in the management of the company in any way.
To work on Cesta products, some of the Rwandan weavers pay for the materials, transport costs and rent (if they use a building for a workshop) out of their own wages, financial accounts from one cooperative – seen by the MoS – reveal.
They are also not paid for a bag if they are not up to scratch, Benon Mugisha, an operations manager at All Across Africa, explained. He said he monitors the quality, saying: ‘For Cesta it must be very perfect’.
Cesta said only one per cent of bags are rejected for quality reasons and that the women receive training to reduce waste. It says the women are encouraged to sell the rejects at local markets.
Mr Mugisha – whose organisation is certified by Nest, a non-profit watchdog monitoring ethical standards – also explained that ‘the wages depend on the orders. Some months we may even get no orders’.
A Cesta Collective spokesman said: ‘Cesta Collective was founded to create consistent, dignified employment opportunities for talented female artisans in developing regions. Since inception, we have upheld our mission and remain committed to growing our business and the livelihoods of those who help bring our handbags to life.
‘Cesta has acted in good faith and understanding through our partnership with All Across Africa which operates on the ground in Rwanda. Recent allegations are an attempt to discredit that work with speculative information that has been unethically manipulated. We remain committed to ensuring success is shared equitably by everyone involved.’
An AAA statement, sent to the MoS via Cesta, said the weavers set their own wages and AAA was ‘deeply committed to empowering women, ensuring fairness and transforming lives through dignified work’.