When Jennifer Owens launched Forai years ago, she never dreamed that her vision to empower local refugee and immigrant women would grow to include a stylish boutique in downtown Kirkwood. This past June, however, that’s exactly what happened.
Located at 211 Kirkwood, the new shop sells Forai’s signature line of jewelry and textiles, which are handmade by local immigrant and refugee women. The store also stocks a selection of home and fashion accessories from other socially conscious brands. “Everyone who comes in is so excited that there’s a new store in town, and then even more excited to learn that all the products benefit others,” says Owens.
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Each year, Forai (the faith-based nonprofit’s name stands for “Friends of Refugees and Immigrants”) works with eight to 12 refugee and immigrant women on its artisan and artisan-admin team, and hosts 20 to 30 women who participate in its community sewing classes, empowering them economically while offering a supportive community.
Every purchase of Forai’s artisan-made accessories provides its makers with a fair living wage and opportunities for skill-building. Donations enable the organization to onboard new women into its empowerment program, where they are paired with a mentor or ESL tutor, as many refugees arrive speaking little to no English.
The Backstory
Owens, who has a background in ministry, came up with the idea for Forai after her family agreed to host newly arrived refugees for Thanksgiving dinner in 2008. “Two families came to our home that had been newly resettled from a refugee camp in Nepal,” she recalls. “One of the families was headed by a single mom of two school-aged kids, and she had maybe a second-grade education and had lived in the camp for 17 years. She couldn’t speak a word of English. They left our home, and I could not quit thinking about her.”
The woman’s husband had died, and Owens imagined herself alone in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language. She wondered how she would support herself. “I always loved working with my hands, and I had encountered different organizations that were doing things with women with handicrafts,” Owens says. “So the idea came to me that we could do something where women work with their hands, and that would bridge the language barrier.”
Forai held its first gathering in October 2009 with a group of volunteers and women from Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, Togo, and Kenya. Its jewelry sales first took place at house parties and later at pop-up locations. In May 2014, the organization became an official 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Shortly thereafter, it launched an online store. In 2017, the organization received a grant from the Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis, which provided funding to help them move into a permanent workshop on the campus of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in the Bevo neighborhood. The same organization later approved a grant for the retail space.
The Store
“I was wanting to give our women a lot more work,” says Owens. “We worked so hard for many years to build the wholesale to do the pop-up markets and the online store, and it’s just been slow,” she continues. “If we are going to reach the goal of getting our artisans to the capacity they’ve expressed, and propel our organization forward, we need to accelerate that growth.”
Retail was the next logical step. The Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis was amenable to another grant for startup costs but asked Owens to perform due diligence, crunch the numbers, and have a third party review them. In August 2024, they received word that they had been awarded the grant.
“We are grateful to the Lutheran Foundation of St. Louis, and we are also grateful to Julio Zegarra-Ballon, the owner of Zee Bee Market, and Morgan Noll, the owner of Social Goods Marketplace, who generously shared their time and numbers to help us create financial models,” says Owens.
Targeting walkable shopping districts, Owens and her team identified the location for their storefront early this year. Located in a high-traffic area, the size was ideal and it didn’t need much work. Forai’s signature jewelry is displayed on one wall. Applique onesies, bibs, and headbands made by its artisans are shown in another area of the store. The rest of the shop carries brands with similar missions, including Prodigal Pottery, handmade wares by women fleeing homelessness, domestic abuse, and sex trafficking in Alabama; body care products from Nashville-based Thistle Farms, which employs women emerging from homelessness, addiction, and domestic violence; and hand-blown glass vases made by women for fair wages in India’s glass district.
“For the store, we wanted a much bigger collection to give people a lot of different reasons to come in,” Owens says. “Because we’re a mission-driven company, we wanted to introduce the community to all of these other organizations that are doing such great work. It’s purchases that are changing lives.”
