We are crowdfunding to expand our artisan community, create jobs and preserve the traditional skills of Balinese craftsmen for future generations.

We want to expand our artisan community by 50%, train our artisans to work with new materials, learn additional skills, and help create long term sustainable livelihoods.

Today we work with a total of 53 artisans, making a measurable impact on their livelihoods.

If, with our backers’ support we raise £20,000, we will be able to reach our initial goal and set a further milestone.

For every £465 raised, we can train another artisan. Here are the ways you can help:

For the last few months, we have been working in Bali with our artisan communities creating a new limited edition collection of bags and accessories exclusively for our backers.

Every piece is consciously designed to be multi-functional and to compliment the other pieces in the collection.

Due to the characteristics of the material and the weaving methods we incorporate, our bags are lightweight, flexible, and very resilient.

Founded in 2017 by Lorna Watson, a trained goldsmith and designer, with 25 years expertise in the luxury goods industry, STELAR is the realisation of a vision to re-imagine the relationships between craftsmanship and culture, community and planet.

During a trip to Indonesia in 2016, Lorna met a family of artisans in East Bali whose ancient lineage of craftsmanship and the future of their community were under threat. For Lorna this was a tragedy - one that she set out to apply her passion, energy and creative flair to reverse. Thus began our collaboration.

We co-create within these communities to re-imagine ancient skills with a collective vision that is far more exciting than a singular one. Our high quality, hand-crafted bags and accessories are rapidly becoming ‘must-haves’ in today’s international marketplace.

By honouring existing traditions and techniques, and by using locally sourced and organically grown materials, we have developed a regenerative and sustainable business model that takes care of our people and our planet.

Our artisans are custodians, protecting their skills for future generations, with the future of fashion lying, quite literally, in their hands.

By up-skilling and elevating this expertise, we are empowering a new generation of artisans to preserve techniques and traditions inherited from their forefathers. 

We support and celebrate these artisan communities whose way of life and complex ancient wisdom fosters harmony between their people, their place and the land that surrounds them.

By providing immediate income opportunities and stable work, flexibility and salaries on average 2.4 x the national living wage, we create measurable, positive impact on the livelihoods of artisans from disadvantaged communities in Bali.

Our artisans are able to stay in their communities and work from home with incomes that support them and their families. This means that they can honour commitments to their family, pay for their children’s education, optimise their natural creativity and harness the intelligence of local ecosystems that have supported them for generations.

We place the people and skills behind what we make at the heart of our venture, re-establishing a sense of value and pride within their communities and making a significant contribution to the provision of long-term sustainable livelihoods for both existing and next generation artisans.

We believe every beautifully hand-crafted item has an equally fine story behind it.

This is why every hand-crafted item is accompanied by a 5-digit unique code, connecting you to the origins of your item and the artisan who created it. Simply type your item’s code into the portal on our website to meet your artisan.

We believe that knowing where our products come from, who made them, how, and when, should be a standard, rather than a luxury. This is why we have built STELAR from the ground up, building each relationship and putting every step of our supply chain in place ourselves.

We work directly with suppliers to select our materials, minimising waste and water usage whilst maximising quality at each step. 

By applying this integrated approach, we are able to simplify logistics, minimise transportation, and lower human and environmental impact, which in turn, results in dramatically fewer CO2 emissions than traditional supply and distribution chains.

The following icons identify the sustainable characteristics of each product and can be found on the product page for every item:

Jacquard

Our jacquard items are intricately crafted using 100% cotton and are inspired by a form of craftsmanship that has existed in Bali for millennia. We use this traditional French jacquard weaving process because it is derived from the ancient Balinese dyeing technique ikat, Indonesian for ‘bind’. 

The raised warp threads in jacquard make them delicate, and because the yarn is dyed before being woven together rather than printing the pattern on, we are able to create versatile, highly specialised and eye-catching designs.

Bamboo

Organically grown and harvested by our artisan communities on their own land, bamboo grows easily and quickly, regenerates itself, and is highly durable.

Leather 

Our leather is sourced from tanneries in neighbouring Java, as a by-product of the meat industry from farms committed to the ethical treatment of animals. Organic and sustainable farming reduces deforestation and utilises eco-friendly disposal systems. After low-level chemical tanning, our leather is hand cut and hand woven on wooden frames, which eliminates the air and noise pollution that would normally result from mechanised production.

The current nature of fast-fashion demands low costs and fast turnaround, with fair working conditions and environmental concerns overlooked. As a result, we are faced with an industry that is largely unsustainable.

Consumer preferences are challenging existing business models, demanding that we ‘make much less, make it better and make it more meaningfully’

We produce design-led, quality-based styles that are cross-seasonal and made to last. Our slow fashion ethos:

Buy less, buy better.

At Stelar, we are championing a new way of thinking and of connecting people – a responsible way of doing business.

With your help, we are hoping to raise £20,000 to allow us to :

• Invest in growing our community of artisans. We will be able to expand our community by 50%, train them to work with new materials, learn additional skills, and help create long term sustainable livelihoods for them.
• Invest in block chain technology. This will allow us to trace the provenance of every item we create to its source, enabling us to acknowledge each craftsman, skill and material involved and measure the impact we are creating within our communities.

More on Blockchain Technology

We hope to invest £8,000 of our target money into completing the first two phases of integrating blockchain technology into our business. 

Ultimately, this process will allow us to work with specialist developers and engineers to build a more efficient and robust product tracking infrastructure. Most importantly, it will give our customers fully transparent, timestamped and verified information about the journey of their STELAR item from its source. 

Financial backing from our crowdfunding supporters will fund the initial phases of the project. This would include working with business analysts and data architects to map out a tailored design and trial mock-ups.

If we raise more than £20,000...

If your pledges take us beyond our target, we will be able to grow our artisan community faster, to add new weaving techniques to our ranges, to introduce innovative eco-friendly materials and to expand our product range. It will also enable us to accelerate the implementation of the  block chain technology to provide a robust platform on which to grow our unique business model long into the future.