Satisfy your wanderlust with conscious e-commerce from the most exciting marketplaces of the world!
When we first stumbled upon Wild Bum, we almost couldn’t believe our luck. A marketplace dedicated to travel guides to the most beautiful destinations on Earth, written by real travelers to satisfy even the most desperate wanderlust among us? We have to be friends!
Shanny Harel and Kelly Roth founded the Nopo with a vision to foster a sense of discovery across barriers – from geography, to language and culture – sparking a taste of the curiosity and enchantment we have when traveling to new destination.
During the long months of conceptualization and market research preceding our launch, it became clear that The Nopo would be much more than an ecommerce site; we wanted to connect people and share the tapestry of stories that shape the inspiration for the products themselves.
Both incurable travelers and frustrated by the lack of a unified e-commerce platform for high-quality and fair-trade artisanal crafts worldwide, Kelly & Shanny rolled up their sleeves and set out to create such a place themselves.
The Nopo launched in March 2020 just as the pandemic hit, with Morocco as its first destination, followed soon after by Mexico and with many more exciting destinations to follow. Starting a global marketplace during a worldwide pandemic was incredibly challenging, but we also knew that our idea was more relevant now than ever before. We managed to unearth truly exceptional craftspeople whose entire livelihoods were in question because of the pandemic. We built The Nopo artisan by artisan, product by product, knowing that we were offering a lifeline to their businesses while at the same time providing shoppers who were trapped at home, like us, a new way to discover and engage with these creators.
What sets the Nopo aside from other marketplaces though is its focus on the stories that lie behind each of these crafts. In our selection process, we get the chance to talk to artists and artisans and hear about the joys and challenges of working with your hands, creating beauty with every expert knot of a string, every blow of a hammer on a copper plate, every deft movement of a hand on wet clay spinning on a potter’s wheel.
That is how we found out amazing stories such as Paloma and Ricardo’s, who fell in love at an impromptu Valentine’s party and built their life together making macramé art. Or about Khawla and Aya, high-school friends who created Morocco’s first marine leather start-up saving the Earth one sustainable wallet after another.
Shopping fair-trade artisanal crafts creates a virtuous circle of humanistic consumerism that will elevate everyone – buyer and seller – while helping to preserve traditions and cultures.
By providing artisans around the world with operations and logistic solutions we enable them to access global audiences of conscious consumers who are increasingly becoming more aware of the materials and processes that lie behind the product and the human lives touched by their purchases.
It’s no surprise then that we fell in love with the Wild Bum crew immediately and have worked on a host of amazing content for our joint audiences coming to your screens over the month of May. Stay tuned on Wild Bum’s and the Nopo’s Instagram accounts and sites for live events, posts, stories and reels to assuage your travel thirst and find inspiring crafts to satisfy your wanderlust with.
About the Author
Arianna Meschia is the Content Writer and Artisan Relations Manager at The Nopo, an experience-driven marketplace, connecting online shoppers with the greatest artisans in the most spectacular marketplaces of the world.
