About Ethnic Elements and our Authentic African Jewelley
Ethnic Elements is a family run business with a passion for anything a little bit unusual and exotic. The inspiration for Ethnic Elements started when friends and family fell in love with the African jewelllery, trinkets and gifts we were bringing back from our many ventures into African continent. Eventually, people started to request certain items for their own friends and family, and we started to venture further off the beaten track in order to source unusual, yet beautifully made items, to fulfil these requests. It was at this point that the concept for Ethnic Elements was born.
On our many ventures, we started to speak and come in contact with the local people more and more, leaning more about their culture and communities. In one particular village, we learned that the average family wage at the height of tourism is £1.75 per week. When the tourists go home this weekly wage is not guaranteed. Their language is purely spoken because literacy is at 0%, any form of education is passed down through parents and usually consists of the children being fluent in several different languages from a young age. The future prospects for the children in these villages is, again determined by their parents. For the boys, if their father is a fisherman, at the age of around 4 years old they will be taken onto their fathers boat to also learn to be a fisherman.
The girls are left at home with their mothers where they learn how to look after the younger children and learn how to make some of the most fabulous items of jewellery and trinkets, which their fathers sell to either the tourists, if they are lucky or, more likely, to the local shop vendors, who pay pennies for their work and sell them onto the tourists at a highly marked up price. It is from these villages that most of our authentic African jewellery stock is sourced, personally by us.
Each item on our Ethnic Elements website is individually hand made by the women of the villages, the beads and stones are shaped and polished by hand, threaded, tied and decorated all by hand with whatever materials they have available to them at the time. Because of the poverty, nothing ever goes to waste. Some of the methods are so familiar to them that once the beads have been made it takes them mere minutes to turn them into a fabulously decorated yet delicate and intricate necklace. Some other the other items such as the trinket boxes represent hours and hours of painfully intricate and time consuming work.
As soon as we discovered this, we made the decision not only to cut out the middle man from our stock acquisitions but to pay the villagers a price for these items which represents the work they put into them. This way, the money goes directly to the crafts people and provides a source of income for the village which would otherwise not be there, allowing them to buy items, which they deem to be luxuries, but here in Britain we would be simple necessities.
Each item of jewellery in our shop is individually hand picked and inspected for quality by ourselves. Because these items are hand made, and because the materials used depend on what is available to them, no two items on the shop are identical even though the pattern may be similar. In addition, all of the items seen are limited and we cannot guarantee that they will be available again at a future date, providing you with the opportunity to own something which few others are able to.
We hope you like our authentic African jewellery products as much as we do, and hope you will join us in providing support for those without a chance of the opportunities we take for granted.
It all starts with making a purchase from our shop.
Thank You.
