Raven + Lily Go Global With Design


After traveling the world with her documentary filmmaker husband, designer Kirsten Dickerson decided she wanted to do more to help some of the women they'd met in their travels.

Three years later, Raven + Lily was born.

Dickerson founded the socially-responsible brand last year with her friend, graphic designer Sophia Hirokawa Lin, to help provide opportunities for women living in India, Ethiopia and Cambodia. Many of the women are HIV positive and living in rural villages, without any job prospects.

“More than anything, the women want dignity, not charity,” Dickerson explained.

The business was designed to help communities thrive and “break the cycle of poverty,” she said.

She and Lin felt they could do this by providing jobs for the women and training them in design skills.


The women are taught a skill, such as sewing, jewelry-making, screen printing or paper-making, and provided with a fair-trade wage to make jewelry, clothes, stationery and accessories, which are sold online and through boutiques in the United States.

In addition to the individual wages the women earn, each community is given a portion of the profits to apply towards education, literacy and healthcare programs.

Outside of a small salary paid to herself, Lin and two part-time staff, all of the money goes back into the business to fund the programs, Dickerson said.


Many of the women had been taught crafting skills in the past through micro-enterprise programs run by international non-governmental organizations, but often the women didn’t have a marketplace to sell their products and the merchandise didn’t have enough diversity for the international market, Dickerson explained.

“Most of the time, they only learned one pattern and would just repeat it over and over,” she said.

By enlisting designers to help conceptualize the designs, Dickerson hopes to broaden the appeal of their goods, along with teaching the women a new skill.

Led by fashion designer Lori Fox, Raven + Lily's design team collaborates with artists such as Los Angeles jewelry designer Tiffany Kunz to create traditional designs for the women based on their heritage, and to help train the women in producing jewelry, apparel and stationery collections.

Dickerson said they try to make the goods as eco-friendly and sustainable as possible by using recycled local materials and natural products whenever they can.

The Cambodian women use vegetable dyes for screenprinting and fabric remnants from nearby apparel factories to make clothes and handbags on wooden handlooms. Additionally, the women in Northern India create decorated stationary from cotton and newspaper remnants, while the women in Northern Ethiopia use artillery shells from former war conflicts found by local farmers to melt into beads and create beaded jewelry.

Bullet casings are melted down to make beads for beaded jewelry in Ethiopia.

There are currently 219 women in the program overall. Some were formerly trafficked in the sex industry and many of the women are ostracized because of their HIV-positive status, Dickerson said.

“People are bringing dignity and beauty to the women by wearing [the jewelry and clothing],” she said. “The women say they feel like they’re famous.”


The merchandise is sold online through the Raven + Lily website, as well as through individual boutiques and the Skirball Museum gift shop. Items range from $30 to $40 for earrings and $60 to $150 for necklaces, to $35 to $66 for bags and apparel.

As long as the business is sustainable, Dickerson says she hopes it can grow to other countries.

Now, Raven + Lily have started working with women at the Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles to make candles for the upcoming holiday season, as well as with Masai women in Kenya to create jewelry for next spring.