PALE: Natural Lidded Laundry Basket

Upstyle your laundry room and bring a little joy to laundry day with the stunning PALE laundry hamper - woven by hand on the shores of Lake Turkana in North Western Kenya. Woven from hand-dyed doum palm leaf which grows wild in the arid Turkana landscape, these lidded laundry baskets are structurally robust and aesthetically pleasing. This collection comes in three sizes.

These laundry baskets have travelled from the shores of the Jade Sea on a bold journey of sustainable craft and ethical production. The Turkana region of Kenya – its largest county - is part of the famous ‘Cradle of Mankind’, where some of the earliest evidence of human evolution has been found. It’s also a part of Africa infamous for severe drought, which this landscape has suffered from since the eighties.

In 1992, a Catholic charity started up a basketry craft project in Turkana to help combat the effects of long-term marginalisation, poor infrastructure and weak integration with the wider Kenyan economy. Today, 300 women from six local villages weave baskets here as a means of income.

For many of these weavers, weaving these laundry baskets means the difference between paying school fees and not. For this collective to continue to thrive and grow means sustainable livelihoods for more families, and essential growth of the Turkana economy.