Stacey Edgar, executive director of the International Folk Art Market, has made a career out of representing artists in far-flung places. Edgar started her company, Global Girlfriend, in 2003 from a $2,000 tax refund and built it into a flourishing organization that sold fair-trade handbags and accessories made by artisans from around the world. Edgar was an assistant professor at University of Colorado in Boulder prior to moving to Santa Fe, and she recently spoke with Pasatiempo about her vision for IFAM.
When you started Global Girlfriend, you had already traveled a lot at that time? No, I was not a very well-traveled person when I started the company. My mother-in-law had been asked to be on the board of the World Food Program. My father-in-law had been a politician, and when they left office, they were both asked by Catherine Bertini — then head of the United Nations World Food Program — to join two different boards.
They had done some traveling to places where the food program was giving food assistance, and there were always women selling their amazing crafts to aid workers at the Addis Ababa Hilton in Ethiopia and places like that. She would bring me back souvenirs, and I’d be like, “Gosh, these things are beautiful. I know people who would love these things.
” That’s where the harebrained idea came in. I was a social worker, and when you’re a social worker, it’s like, “You need a resource, you have a resource? Let’s put you together.” How did thi.
