Wool, water, Wi-Fi: Modernizing an ancient business at the final frontiers of e-commerce

One nighttime successful Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, a felting artisan ended her time with a prayer. May our partners person bully health. May they beryllium ambitious, and successful, and whitethorn their businesses grow. The adjacent morning, sisters-in-law Chinara Makashova and Nazgul Esenbaeva, and the radical they worked with awoke to what seemed similar a miracle: Shopify orders. So galore Shopify orders. 

They got to work. It felt similar everything was falling into place: The institution they had built from scratch was exporting felted slippers and artisan products to wholesale partners astir the globe. And with assistance from USAID’s greenish concern inaugural successful Central Asia, they were expanding their accumulation abilities — and yet gathering their ain modern, direct-to-consumer web store: 1 with the outgo processing and information information infrastructure to assistance them scope customers directly. 

But conscionable arsenic their caller ecommerce infrastructure was coming together, the USAID backing vanished astir the world — leaving them with a $35,000 backing gap. In truthful galore places, the net makes gathering a retail concern casual — but successful the world’s astir land-locked country, with a banking strategy bogged down by sanctions against o …

Read the afloat communicative astatine The Verge.