Paul van Zyl: A great pleasure, Michael

MS: You are, among many things, the chief executive and co-founder of Maiyet, a fabulous and fascinating fashion and social justice initiative, if I might put it this way, that is making the world a fairer and perhaps a more chic place. It describes itself as "pioneering a new luxury by creating a fashion brand that celebrates rare artisanal skill from unexpected places". But there is so much more to your story than Maiyet. Indeed, it is the latest manifestation of an activist proclivity that is deeply rooted. So, Paul, before we look at the business, let's go back to the start and look at you. What is your story?

PvZ: I am South African. I am a white South African and that has really coloured my life; it has shaped my life because obviously I was born in apartheid South Africa and I was incredibly lucky to be born in a family where my parents from as early as I can remember told me that we were living in a very unjust place.

In a subtle and quiet way, they built in me an expectation that this was an injustice that had to be actively opposed, not just intellectually opposed. Had I not been born in apartheid South Africa, I probably would have been an entrepreneur and gone to business school.

But because I was born in apartheid South Africa and with the parents I have I became a lawyer, because it seemed that would best equip me to deal with the particular injustice that was apartheid. My first real encounter with activism was arriving at university at the age of 17 and being exposed to a group of young black students who were extraordinarily brave and were fighting the good fight.

So I joined the anti-apartheid student movement, and very shortly thereafter those black students were arrested and detained – without lawyers or doctors or access to anybody – under emergency regulations that were then in place. Several of them were very badly tortured. A few of them were abducted and disappeared and they were killed.

That put me on a path to activism; there is nothing more intensely personal than somebody who you've been in a meeting with the day before not arriving the day after and then never returning. When I graduated from law school one of the things I happened to do was establish one of the first nationwide victim groups called Khulumani, which in Zulu means speak out.

It was an attempt to let most parents, mostly mothers, of children who had been abducted and disappeared, campaign for truth and justice but also give them a forum of mutual support. That then led me to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

MS: Well let's pick that up there, Paul – you were for three years the executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which involved Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. That was investigating apartheid-era crimes. What did that experience give you? What did it teach you?

PvZ: It was an intensely formative experience. Firstly, it taught me about prudence. The Truth Commission was an attempt to confront the past – not sweep it under the carpet and not succumb to amnesia. But it was also an attempt to ensure that the way we confronted the past did not destroy the very fragile democracy we were building.

It would have been both just and understandable for Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela to adopt an entirely different path, to be strident in their calls for justice and to develop a model which just allowed victims a voice and to tell their stories and to have their suffering officially acknowledged.

But at the same time the model gave perpetrators the opportunity to confess and reveal the truth and to do so as part of a broad, three-year public conversation in the country with itself about the true nature of apartheid and about the past.

It was both an incredibly complex and difficult process, but it could only be done by men and women of great prudence. It taught me that, and it also taught me about this very famous concept of Ubuntu, which Archbishop Tutu invokes a lot and which is the sense that we are who we are because of our connectedness with others, that human beings live in a web of relationships and that we're at our strongest when we reinforce those relationships and that we think about ourselves in terms of our mutual obligations.

It was very idiomatic for the Truth Commission, because some places in response to the horror of apartheid might have tried to drive people apart. And this was about trying to reaffirm our bonds of humanity. It goes further than the Truth Commission; it is a deeper and more powerful philosophy in general that human beings owe a debt of solidarity to each other.

MS: The themes that you are invoking there include compassion, empathy, prudence, as you mentioned, and community and humanity. They are themes that resonate with a lot of the guests that I have had, and, it would seem to me from my research, pivotal to Maiyet. We will come to that in a moment, but they are also, those themes, fundamentally important to something else that as a lawyer you co-founded, which was found the International Centre for Transitional Justice in 2001 to help deal with legacies of abuse and injustice and to protect and improve human rights around the world. How is that going?

PvZ: ICTJ is around and well and thriving as an organisation. The process of helping countries deal with the past has never been more important. What I liked about the founding spirit of that organisation and that continues today is that it was not an endeavour to go to other people's countries and tell them what to do.

It was an endeavour to say we in South Africa had a particular approach to dealing with the past. The people of East Timor have followed a path. The people of Peru have followed a path. The people of Morocco have followed a path. And you as the people who are responsible for shaping your country and its future have a real opportunity to learn from others' experiences and to then make your own decisions but to do so in a more intelligent and informed way.

And so it tried to equip human rights organisations, victims, leaders of a country, to steer their country towards a more just and more equitable future, but did so without being dogmatic or ideological or preachy. And we have found that there is a real space for that in the world.

MS: OK, to Maiyet. Can you please talk about its genesis and its evolution?

PvZ: ICTJ is a non-profit organisation and I really, through that work, became convinced that a very important part of a country's success is its laws, its constitution, its sense of the rule of law and its commitment to justice. An equally important part of a country's success is its commitment to giving dignity and opportunity and prosperity to its citizens, particularly countries in which resources are very mal-distributed and skewed, and particularly towards the bottom of a pyramid.

The fusion between Maiyet and my prior life was the sense that unless you grow economies from the bottom up and unless you give people at the bottom of a pyramid some sense of dignity and opportunity, not only is that economically unwise, it also puts those countries profoundly at risk – it creates the risk of fragility and instability.

Maiyet started with this effort of trying to say if we could find people in developing economies and we could give them opportunity through entrepreneurship and we could grow economies from the bottom up, that would be making a really important contribution.

And to found a business that used the power of entrepreneurship and the power of the markets to try to do so in a more systematic way would lead to social outcomes that I cared a lot about – alleviating poverty, empowering women, bringing people together from opposite sides of conflict. So the genesis of Maiyet was really two steps.

There was a deep conversation with one of my co-founders, a man called Daniel Lubetzky, a serial social entrepreneur, in which he and I thought the real opportunity was in fact fashion and then we realised that he and I were both profoundly ill-equipped to establish such an endeavour without somebody who had that skill. And so our third co-founder, Kristy Caylor, who had deep expertise in the fashion space, came on.

Kristy and I were then getting onto aeroplanes and travelling to 25 cities in six months all around the world. The journey started with a sense of wanting to build a brand that could drive economic opportunity and therefore good social outcomes. The organising principle of Maiyet was born on those 25 country visits, which was about finding artisans.

Artisans in developing economies have extraordinary skills, and those skills are not fully harnessed, either for the world or for them, because they lack access to markets. They often have incredible skills but they don't have a design sensibility that would resonate in markets. And they don't have the infrastructure and the wherewithal to produce goods that they can consistently deliver into those markets.

And so Maiyet coalesced around this idea of finding the next generation of global artisans. Those artisans are as likely to be found in India or in Peru or in Indonesia as they are to be found in Italy and France, which was the birthplace of luxury and where you saw those artisans herald from.

Then we had to do all those things that I mentioned – find those artisans, provide them with skills and training and infrastructure, build a brand that gave them design direction which had a coherent aesthetic sensibility, and then sell that brand to the best stores in the world, starting with Barneys and through to Net-a-Porter to these great luxury boutiques and now to our own boutique in Crosby Street in Soho in New York.

MS: What are you doing in Melbourne, by the way?

PvZ: I am speaking at the business seminar organised by the Melbourne International Fashion Festival. I was able to talk yesterday about the experience of Maiyet and where we have got to in the two short years we have been in the market.

We have a group of Australian investors, who have been extraordinary and wonderful and we have been engaging with them. And we're looking at the possibilities in Australia and it actually turns out that Australians buy Maiyet in disproportionate numbers, and visit our store in New York in disproportionate numbers and I think there is something about Australia as a country which shows great resonance with what we're trying to do, so it was a logical place to come.

MS: And will there be retail outlets that will be carrying Maiyet the brand in Australia?

PvZ: This is something we're actively exploring right now.

MS: And in the meantime, should you prefer to support a brand like Maiyet, which is really taking on brands like Hermes and Dior etc, go online?

PvZ: Yes. You can buy Maiyet on maiyet.com, our own website. You can also buy Maiyet through Net-a-Porter and you can buy it at Barneys online or when you visit New York.

MS: Can you give me some case studies, please Paul? You talked about access to market, and another thing that is important here of course is access to capital. What are some of the things that have been going on?

PvZ: One of our most exciting projects has been to harness silk produced by silk weavers in Varanasi. Varanasi in India, as many people might know, is the oldest continuously inhabited city on the planet. It is the birthplace of Hinduism and it is where Buddha gave his first sermon. It is an incredibly sacred city, and it has a 1000-year-old tradition of silk weaving. Indians of a certain class all had their wedding saris in Varanasi silk.

When we first encountered the silk weaving we were blown away by its beauty and the skill required to produce it. We sent a silk weaving expert to go and look at the weavers and perhaps give them some tips and she came back and said "I can teach these people nothing, they are extraordinary". But there are 95,000 weavers out of work in Varanasi.

It is a skill and a heritage and a tradition that is very much at risk because silk is now power-loomed in gigantic factories and sold back to the people who would have bought hand-loomed silk – at a third of the price and a 10th of the quality. So the only way you can preserve this silk is by treating it not as a commodity, but as a luxury – which it truly is. The challenge to doing that is that silk weaving is done at home.

People weave it literally in their homes and when it rains, the silk is ruined by the water. For four months a year it is too hot to weave. It is dirty – on pit looms that are dug into peoples homes. There are kids running around. There are goats in people's huts. So the only way to preserve it is to build a facility. What we have done is we have engaged with one of the most interesting architects in the world right now, David Adjaye, through building a silk-weaving facility in Varanasi which will house more than 100 weavers.

That will provide people with a dignified place to work, and a more productive place to work. It will also create a facility that is as beautiful on the outside as the silk is on the inside, and will be a real temple or a shrine to silk weaving. And it will create the sense of the covetability of Varanasi silk, which Maiyet will then buy. The real key to all of this is a deep partnership we have with a not-for-profit organisation called Nest.

Nest is an amazing partner organisation. They raise philanthropic dollars to build facilities like the Varanasi facility and they give training and infrastructure to weavers and to other artisans. Then we as Maiyet act as the market force. We buy the silk. There is no point investing philanthropically in artisans to make stuff that nobody buys and does not find its way to markets. So there is symbiosis – a not-for-profit incubator and a for-profit market force is what leads to the social ends that we're seeking to achieve.

MS: There is this beautiful melange of impact investing and social enterprise going on around the world. We both believe there is still a very important role for philanthropy and charity and that there are organisations that are going to be and can only be grant-dependent. They are powerful and have a role, too. But what is increasingly happening is this rise of social enterprise and impact investing. It seems to be happening in parallel with an increase in a global consciousness, which in turn seems to be fuelled by technology, particularly communications technology and the internet. It is a very powerful mixture. What is your view of what is happening?

PvZ: I think there are really interesting parallels between the human rights movement and the civil rights movement and the social entrepreneur movement. These twin forces are absolutely indispensable to the world today. In one a group of people are trying to create a rights-based framework for people to be able to lead dignified lives in a context of fairness and rule of law and to overcome all forms of discrimination which impede that dignified life. That is the human rights movement.

And then the social entrepreneur movement is saying is it very difficult to imagine leading dignified lives based on equality and fairness and a great constitution if you don't have housing and healthcare and access to the constituents of a decent life. But the constituents for a decent life are not things that are handed to you on a platter. I am a great believer in the power of work and the responsibility of work. So what social entrepreneurs try to do is create a framework where markets can do what they do best – empowering ingenuity and entrepreneurship, but to do so with pro-social outcomes.

I think that the next generation of young people coming out of business school are less excited to go work for the big consulting firms and investment banks and more inclined today to set up their own businesses which as well as having profit engines also try to improve the world.

MS: Why do you think that is? Do you think that says something good about human nature?

PvZ: I think it's partly to do with the moment in time that we're in. There are at least two big macro forces at work. The global financial crisis really shook people's confidence in a particular economic order, and really raised deep questions about fairness, economic fairness.

Then there is the environmental crisis we are confronting, which really is existential. People used to say if we don't act now on climate change it is going to affect the lives of our children. But it is just undeniable it is not just going to affect the lives of our children – it is already affecting everybody's lives right now.

That sense of a particular way of doing business let us down. And a really existential threat of what we're doing to the planet is, instead of scaring us and making us cynical and disaffected, is taking what young people do best – which is to say well I'm going to change this. And one of the most powerful vehicles for doing that is harnessing the power of capital and entrepreneurship towards these pro-social ends.

MS: How does it work at Maiyet in terms of pricing policy and revenue share with the artisans and others involved along the supply chain?

PvZ: One of the key things we do with Nest is ensure that every one of the artisan partners we work with not only pay a fair and living wage but also do not engage in the kind of unacceptable practices like child labour or other sorts of practices which fall below a minimum threshold.

So in one way we think about economic fairness through a negative screen, which is there are certain minimums you have to achieve. The more exciting thing we're trying to achieve is to come at it through a positive screen, which is to say if you can invest in the infrastructure of these artisans, if you can give silk weavers a workshop or if you can give a workshop to the hand carvers of horn and bone or the hand pourers of metal in Kenya who we work with, the jewellers, what you do is you are not working in a negative screen.

You're actually helping them grow the pie. You're giving them opportunity. A core principal of ours is not only in conjunction with Nest do we help provide the infrastructure and the wherewithal, but we also do not sign exclusivity agreements with them, for example. So, having given them the wherewithal to produce exclusive goods, they can then sell those goods to anyone and anybody can source from them.

It is really an expression of enlightened self-interest. We want them to grow; we genuinely want those artisans to grow. It would be incompatible with our values to say we will build you a workshop but we will give you golden handcuffs and you can only sell the stuff to us.

We think it is better for Maiyet out and for everyone else if more people are sourcing from them and they become more productive and their skills get better. You de-risk the supply chain by having more people sourcing from them.

MS: How many people are involved now? You have been going for a couple of years.

PvZ: Do you mean in our company, or with the artisans we work with?

MS: Both.

PvZ: We have about 35 staff working at Maiyet. And we have several hundred artisans. We have 300 to 400 right now and that number is increasing pretty significantly as our order size increases.

MS: You travel a lot. You started with a 25-country tour in search of artisans. You continue to travel a lot. Are you seeing results at the household level with people who have become involved?

PvZ: I spoke yesterday on the same panel as a really amazing guy called Simone Cipriani, who works for Ethical Fashion Initiative of the International Trade Centre. The very first artisans who we really invested in with Nest were a husband and wife team, Anton and Benta, who produce really amazing jewellery out of Kenya.

We found for them some land and built them a workshop and gave them better equipment, and better health and safety techniques. And Simone said at the panel we spoke at yesterday that his initiative is now working with Anton and Benta, that they have gone from two people to 16 people and that they are regarded as some of the best jewellery artisans in Canada.

So there is this really very small but very powerful little example of two people making stuff in a lean-to adjacent to their house. They have now got a workshop in a facility and have gone on to being able to employ 16 people to now being able to source other people and having a reputation for fine work. What I found most touching about that story is that Anton and Benta, in their very small spare time, also work with orphans in the community to try to provide them with training and skills. So they are passing on the good fortune that they have had to people who have not had opportunity. There is a tremendous human story there, which is if you give people opportunity it brings out their better angels. And through that solidarity, people have a commitment to each other.

MS: Am I right in saying that this couple has 10 children, of which seven are their own and three are adopted?

PvZ: That is exactly right.

MS: I suppose that is an example that would be hard to trump in terms of enlightened self-interest and how that can lead to improvement in the lives of others.

PvZ: Yes. And you think about it – living in very difficult circumstances in Kenya and you have seven children and you adopt three more. That is the embodiment of Ubuntu – our obligation to other people.

MS: The future: what do you see? What do you want?

PvZ: Well, I really down to my core believe Maiyet is going to be a globally recognised and extraordinarily successful company, and I think that we will genuinely pioneer a new luxury brand and other people will follow in our wake and improve on what we've done, but we will be part of a movement. We will continue to invest in our supply chain.

We will continue to find these spectacular artisans and source from them consistently. We will continue to open our own stores and expand our company. What is remarkable about that is our economic interests as Maiyet are very closely aligned with the economic interests of our artisans.

The more we're able to sell in New York and London and Paris and Tokyo and Seoul, the more we are able to source from our artisans. And the more therefore we can achieve the powerful social goals we set up Maiyet to achieve.

MS: The final question to everybody in The Zone, Paul, is what is the hardest thing you've have ever had to do, at least that you are prepared to speak about here?

PvZ: The hardest thing I have had to do is go back to some of the mothers who I worked with when we were trying to campaign to discover the truth about what happened to their children. And then in the Truth Commission we discovered what happened to their children. And their children were abducted and killed.

Through the work of the commission we discovered the circumstances in which that happened. And on one level it brought an end to the agony of not knowing. On another level, it brought them a truth that no parent should ever have to hear.

And that was very, very, very hard to do that because everybody knew and suspected when we started on the search for the truth that the answer would be an uncomfortable one. But you are never fully prepared for the true anguish that that truth brings.

MS: Paul, thank you very much for your time today. It has been a pleasure to spend time with you and I really wish you and your colleagues and all involved great success.

PvZ: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me.