Social Responsibility

At Sandra Cadavid, our passion is to design luxury handbags and jewelry, but not at the expense of our community, transparency, partners, employees or environment.  From our founding, we have embraced the idea to give back to the community through philanthropy, serve our valued clients and investors with complete transparency, treat and compensate our partners fairly, and create handbags that are environmentally friendly.  But as a start-up company with limited resources, could we achieve our vision to build a socially responsible company and brand? Here we reminded ourselves of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous advice to “do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”  So, what have we done in our first three years?

Community and Philanthropy: Aligned with our brand of classic luxury, we support, through charitable contributions and fundraisers, not-for-profit organizations that blend art, design and history.  This includes art galleries, museums, zoos and other cultural institutions that enhance quality of life and help to revitalize communities. 

Economic Development: We actively seek out and hire women who have faced tragic, senseless violence in Cali, Colombia and are in need of work to support their family.  In many cases, these women lack a skill set to become self-sufficient, and are unable to find work in their community because of their circumstances. These amazing women are among our team members.

Partners: We compensate our partners in both the US and Colombia with exceptional wages and benefits in exchange for their time and talent.  We located our manufacturing in Colombia to produce the highest quality luxury handbags and jewelry in the world, not cut costs.

Environment: While many leather tanneries use toxic chemicals to dye leather, we use only non-toxic vegetable-based dyes.  That means that our partners, clients and community are never exposed to dyes capable of harming individual and public health.

Environment: We use only traditional leathers in the construction and design of every handbag.  We do not use any ‘exotic’ materials such as alligator, python, or ostrich that may be obtained through illegal poaching of wildlife in their natural habitat.

Environment: We package every handbag in a sustainable and reusable cloth pouch to limit our use of paper-based boxes.

And we’re just getting started.  At Sandra Cadavid, social responsibility is a part of every product we design.