After returning from the winter break and family reunion, we picked up right where we left off. First, we made arrangements to procure the material needed for the scarf samples we want to produce with Matico's Huarmi Maqui. We are happy to announce that the promising meetings with Karla Rodriguez paid off, making her and KUN Eco Fibres our first provider of ethically sourced alpaca yarn, and our second partner after Huarmi Maqui.
By end of March, Karla plans to deliver 2.5 kg of her finest baby alpaca yarn, produced jointly with the members of the local communities. We can't wait to see our first samples realized with these beautiful, hand-spun yarns, woven by the skillful artisans of Huarmi Maqui.
Shortly after, we contacted a chocolate producer named Leyenda, who peaked our interest as an option to broaden our product spectrum. At this point, it is worth mentioning that Ecuador has a strong history with cacao. For millennia, cacao has been consumed by the various civilations in the region, with the oldest evidence of its use dating back 5,000 years. Today, they produce over 60% of the world's fine flavour cacao. Despite this, Ecuador has not been a major exporter of chocolate in bar form thus far, with big European and American firms hogging most of the market for this high-value product. Recently, some Ecuadorian brands have finally started to enter this market, benefitting from their proximity to the source. Visiting Leyenda, a small-scale, high-end chocolate brand, was a unique experience. Their charismatic leader Mario Tapia welcomed us warmly, and then let his trusty team introduce us to their vision, products and factory. We were amazed by the chocolates we saw and tasted, the positive atmosphere among the colleagues, and by the lush smell of chocolate lingering wherever you went. At the end of our visit, we found ourselves interested in developing a Socialpaca chocolate brand, and scheduled a visit at a plantation for the next week.
Leyenda works with well-organized plantations, and thus pays about 2,600$ per Tonne of cacao according to the farmer we visited, which is 600$ more than the Fairtrade requirement. This price also allows the farmer to pay 20$ per day to harvesters, which is both above the minimum wage and sufficient to afford a better life than many on the Ecuadorian countryside, and up to 40 times as much as, for instance, the 0.50$-0.84$ a day farmers and dependents make in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.
But in the end, we decided to focus on our alpaca products. Chocolate is also a product of drastic exploitation, but we can't hope to succeed if we spread ourselves too thinly. 
Back to the alpacas. Before visiting Leyenda's partner plantation, we had a long-awaited meeting with the founder of PAQOCHA himself, Felipe Segovia, as well as his partner Lorena Pérez. First, Felipe gave us some helpful insights into the operational aspect of his project. After living in communities for 6 years, Felipe founded PAQOCHA in 2006 with a similar intention to Socialpaca's: to improve living conditions in communities by boosting their traditional, artisinal economy. The result is a variety of beautiful, skillfully produced alpaca garments, with fair conditions from alpaca to weaver. Moreover, PAQOCHA believes in offering fair fashion products with a history, and each piece comes with detailed background information, comprised of the community of origin, the name of the spinster, and the name of the weaver or knitter. In sum, an excellent match for Socialpaca.
Since PAQOCHA operates in a way that satisfies our conditions of fair pay and ethical sourcing, we were able to instantly purchase a set of very interesting products. Though they are unlikely to be at the core of Socialpaca’s design strategy, these unique pieces reflect a rich history of traditional methods and design, paired with modern style, packed into in a fair fashion frame. We are excited to see how the European market responds to these first products.
This concluded our first trip to Ecuador, in a very satisfactory way. After visiting PAQOCHA, we headed towards the coast, visiting the aforementioned cacao farm along the way, and then travelled to Peru by bus in order to cut CO2 emissions. After a long journey, we arrived in the city of Ayacucho, from where our next update will report.