From Hand to Heart – Sang and the Beginning of Avanova

Avanova did not begin with a business plan.

It began, to a considerable extent, with Sang looking at things people had made and wondering why more of them never travelled very far beyond the places where they were created.

From Saigon to Salzburg

Before moving to Austria, Sang spent several years working in customer service in restaurants, hotels and travel agencies in Saigon. It suited her rather well: she likes people, likes talking to them and has always been curious about where they come from and how they see the world.

Working with travellers also meant repeatedly explaining Vietnam to people who knew very little about it beyond the usual handful of images.

Food, customs, places, everyday life, history – and, inevitably, the things people make.

When she later moved to Salzburg, she encountered another country with a strong appreciation for things made locally and by hand. Austria has no shortage of workshops, craftspeople, regional materials and people willing to pay attention to where an object came from.

And somewhere in that comparison a rather obvious question appeared:

Why shouldn't the work of small Vietnamese makers find an audience here as well?

Looking for people, not factories

The idea was never to search Vietnam for the cheapest possible producer and put an Avanova label on whatever came out of the container.

Quite the opposite.

Sang started looking for small workshops, individual artists and craftspeople whose work interested us in its own right. Some use techniques that have existed for generations. Others are young designers doing something decidedly modern. Some work with traditional materials; others turn old jeans, wire, beads or scraps into things nobody had thought of before.

What matters to us is not whether something qualifies as sufficiently “traditional”.

What matters is that there is somebody behind it.

Somebody who knows how to make it, has ideas of their own and is allowed to use them.

What fair cooperation means to us

We have never been interested in the familiar business model where the great achievement of international trade consists of finding somebody far away who can be persuaded to work for as little money as possible.

If an artist or workshop creates something good, their work has value. They need to earn money from it. We need to earn money from importing and selling it. And the customer should receive something that was worth making in the first place.

That is considerably less exciting than slogans about saving the world, but it makes for much healthier business relationships.

Over the years some of the people Sang first contacted became long-term partners. Some became friends. Quite often, as tends to happen with Avanova, the distinction became rather blurry.

Between two homes

For Sang, none of this was about choosing Vietnam over Austria or Austria over Vietnam.

Austria is where she lives and where our family built its life. Vietnam is the country she comes from, where much of our family still lives and where many of the people behind Avanova's products work.

The interesting part has always been the road between the two.

Objects cross it. Ideas cross it. People certainly do. Sometimes a handmade bag from Bắc Giang ends up in Salzburg. Sometimes something we encounter in Austria changes the way we look at work being done in Vietnam.

Avanova grew somewhere in between.

From hand to heart

Sang once called the idea behind all this From Hand to Heart.

The phrase survived because, despite sounding suspiciously like something a marketing department might invent, it describes the idea rather well.

We like objects that still contain some evidence of the person who made them: a brushstroke, a stitch, an unusual decision, a small variation that would probably have been eliminated by an industrial production line.

The People & Craft section of Avanova is where we introduce some of those people and show how their work is made.

After all, the object is only half the story.