Cohado, ApiHappi, and Community Sourced Production!

ApiHappi was created in association with the Cohado system and principles. In short, Cohado is a philosophy that emphasizes playing for a community score opposed to a personal score and eliminating waste in the process. Although it may sound simple, it is a very foreign concept to many corporations and organizations functioning today. At our core we function as a social enterprise where we implement Cohado’s “play it forward” attitude on a very practical level. To read more about Cohado’s game and business model please log on to http://cohado.com/

Taking it to streets…from Baltimore to Colombo

Cohado itself has earned great respect in the Baltimore community thanks to relentless efforts of the founder Paulo Gregory Harris and people who believe in working together for the greater good. On the other side of the world we are taking Cohado to streets of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Though many of the processes of our company are based on Cohado our greatest manifestation has been through our system of Community Sourced Production.

Community Sourced Production is a system we created at ApiHappi which counters the traditional factory production model. Instead of opening up a factory and paying employees minimum wage to churn out products as fast as they can, we have come up with a more innovate solution that serves as a “win, win” for us and our producers. The basic meaning of community sourced production is that we train skilled workers to produce our products in their own homes and then we pay them based on the number of products they produce.  This system works well with our culture because it enables women who are staying at home to earn an income while taking care of their families. In many cases this income is greater than what they would get working over 40 hours a week for a large company. It also works well for our company because we are able to take on large bulk orders without having a factory. In fact we still work out of our home office.

The first time our method of Community Sourced Production was really put to the test was June of 2015. We received our first large order of 1,000 handloom stringy bags from a company called GlobeIn in San Francisco(https://globein.com/). Although the task was daunting at first, sticking to our principles of Cohado we were able to put together a triumphant community effort and finish the entire order in three weeks. We learned a lot from that experience and now we are confident that we can push our community even further to serve larger orders in the future.