Former sex workers made these bags. Why I invested two years into this.
by Brian Spivak
In December 2024 I sent a cold message to a company in Tel Aviv that employs survivors of trafficking.
Two years later, the person I brought in to help tell their story was a British-Iranian filmmaker who used to be anti-Zionist.
That is not a sentence I expected to write. It is also why this partnership is incredibly meaning to me
Here is the crazy story.
What most people never see
On the surface, KitePride is a well designed upcycling brand. They take what the world throws away, old kites, parachutes, and sails, gear that has reached the end of its life and would otherwise sit in a landfill for decades, and they turn it into bags and apparel. Beautiful ones. Things people actually want to carry.
That alone would be a good story. It is not the story.
The people sewing those bags are survivors of prostitution and trafficking, women and men. KitePride gives them real work, real wages, dignity, and a route out. Profits go to the Hope Center in Israel, which runs daily support programs and a three month rehabilitation course.
So it is a company that redeems discarded material and, in the same breath, invests in people the world has been happy to discard too. That symmetry is not an accident. It is the entire point. It is also almost invisible if all you see is the product page.
Why Ali Tabrizi, and nobody else
Most people know Ali Tabrizi from Netflix's Seaspiracy, the film that made an enormous number of people rethink their relationship with the ocean and exposed the industry interests protecting it.
Over the last three years his work has moved somewhere else. He has built a body of investigative journalism centered on corruption, inside NGOs and inside governments. Organizations that trade on doing good, or on public trust, while burying what happens internally, including sexual misconduct, abuse, and the machinery that covers it up.
Two threads run through his work. The ocean, and the people that powerful institutions fail.
And there, in a workshop in Tel Aviv, was a company built on precisely those same two threads. Ocean borne material given a second life, and people given one too.
A match like that is not something you manufacture with a media kit and a rate card. You either see it or you do not.
Why it took twenty months
This is the part people assume was a chase. It was not.
KitePride spent much of that period restructuring and moving warehouses. Anyone who has run a small operation through a move like that knows exactly what it does to a calendar. Everything that is not survival gets pushed.
I could have moved on. In this industry the instinct is to move on, because there is always another brand, another campaign, another quarter. Pipelines reward momentum, not patience.
I stayed because a partner worth having is worth waiting for through the messy part. Not every long timeline is a signal of low interest. Sometimes it is just a company doing hard things at the same time.
Rise and Walk
Rise and Walk is a limited edition line produced with Ali. Reclaimed material. Made by people rebuilding their lives. Supporting the work that gets more of them out.
The name says most of it. Something written off, lifted up, and sent forward.
Why I am telling you this one
At Barzel we sit between brands, nonprofits, and creators, and the part of the job I care most about is the matching. Anyone can pull a list of creators in a category. What is harder, and what actually moves people, is finding the one whose life's work already argues for what the brand is doing.
But the match is only where it starts.
We were not handed a brief on this one. We built the business model behind the collaboration, shaped the limited edition line itself, wrote the creative brief, and worked on the landing page. Every layer of it, from the commercial structure down to the words on the page.
None of that was in a contract. It rarely is. A contract describes deliverables, and deliverables are the floor, not the work. The difference between a campaign that runs and a campaign that lands is almost always the part nobody wrote down.
Our clients feel that difference, which is the only reason I mention it. This was an unprompted message I received from the CEO.
I just wanted to take time to thank you personally for your invested time in this mission and campaign to better support women and men who really are in crazy life situations.
Matthias Oppliger, CEO, KitePride
It also came from not dropping a partner when their operations got difficult. I think that part matters more than the pairing.
Twenty months for this. I would wait again.
Brian
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