How I Did It: Amber Chand

Fleeing Uganda, Amber Chand came to the U.S. and built Eziba, a company that provides a creative and business outpost for artisans in war-torn nations.

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As told to Hillary Johnson

Five years ago, Amber Chand's only experience as a businesswoman had been running a museum gift shop. Instead of a career in business, she had earned a master's degree in anthropology. A sense of social responsibility stems in part from her heritage. She grew up a member of the South Asian diaspora in the East African nation of Uganda. That background instilled in her a sense of self-reliance and entrepreneurship. Where most individuals with a mission to foster social change might have gravitated toward the nonprofit sector, Chand went a different way: With her brother-in-law Dick Sabot, she co-founded Eziba, an artisan handicrafts retail company with the explicit mission of providing a market for entrepreneurs from around the world. With Sabot's help, Chand raised $40 million in venture capital. Today, Eziba is working with artisans in 70 countries, has annual sales of $10 million, retail boutiques in upscale stores, a catalog, and an Internet site, and Chand believes she is but an earnings statement away from turning a profit.

I left Uganda at the age of 21. It was in 1973, and Idi Amin had come to power through a military coup. All Ugandans of Asian extraction were expelled: We had to be gone within three months or we'd be shot. I was just heading to Cambridge, England, for graduate studies. But my father lost all his assets, so I had to quickly write to the schools that had accepted me, explaining the circumstances and asking for a full scholarship. The one that came through with flying colors was the University of Michigan, where I ended up studying anthropology.

That period was very powerful for me. I lost my house, my country, and my father -- he died that same year of a heart attack. The question was, was I going to live my life in bitterness and anger or use the experience as an opportunity to grow?

My brother-in-law and dear friend Dick Sabot, who comes from the worlds of business and academia, helped me dream up Eziba. Five years ago, I mentioned to him that I had an opportunity to import some beautiful Rajasthani paintings from India. From there, Dick and I came up with the idea of creating enterprise partnerships with artisans around the world. Our business model would be intensely bottom-line focused. It had to be because we wanted it to endure.

We founded the company at the perfect time in terms of excitement about the Internet. We saw Eziba as an e-commerce company, and we quickly put together a senior executive team that came from well-established organizations. The vice president of operations came from L.L. Bean. The VP of merchandising came from the Sundance catalog. The CEO came from FAO Schwarz. Our team was very careful, very pragmatic.

We discovered within a year that e-commerce alone wasn't going to work for us. So we tested a small catalog, rented a list, and sent it out. And it was extremely successful. Today the catalog does the lion's share of our business. We're typical of catalog retailers -- 2.2 million catalogs will be going out this holiday season. We've also opened up store-within-a-store outposts inside Marshall Field's.

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