UP

Good morning sweet pray partners. Thank you so much for coming to this page and taking the time to pray for Alegria. Your partnership is like knowing we're walking with an army at our side through this journey of creating jobs in Honduras.

I spend a lot of time in the numbers of Alegria. Profits, expenses, sales, channels, markets, and the trends I work for, pray for and look for are usually for those numbers to go up. (well, except expenses, but they seem to do that too.) It's been an interesting year financially for the US. and although we have had a few down months, we are slightly up over 2024 and that's exciting. You may know we have 2 goals for this year. 1. To bring me on staff with a modest salary. 2. To hire an 8th artisan in Honduras.  Now both of those things will require a larger 'up' than what the 1st half of the year saw. And they require that we don't take on any short term debt to meet expenses. For the first time, we made it through May AND June without doing that. (we've ended May in the black 2 years in a row now, but this year we ended June in the black!)

Why short term debt? Well, we pay salaries in Honduras. We don't pay according to sales. This is a different model than many Fair Trade companies that simply place orders as they sell in their countries with artisans. I didn't feel this was creating a 'good job' for our artisans. So we take the highs and lows and we instead balance out our inventory production over the year. So in the summer, we are overstocked, but nearing Christmas, we get low. That requires a lot of math and projections. And sometimes to stimulate sales in the summer, it means we have to run sales and cut into the profit margin a bit. I look at whether a short term loan or sales will cut into the margins more. And sometimes the interest is actually cheaper than running sales.

What impact do salaries have? For our artisans, stability. And for Alegria, salaries are our largest line item in our budget with no other expense even coming close. So there's not a lot of way to skimp on expenses in the lean months. That huge 1st line stays constant every month.  Praise the LORD! That is why we exist! So I get excited every time He has provided for me to send that wire to Honduras.

I almost just deleted all of the paragraphs above and simplified this post down to this, but I do think it helps for you to see why we operate as we do, and how much it takes to create 'good jobs'.  

Would you pray today for 'UP'? For our traffic on our website to go up. For our sales at summer trade shows to go up. For our returning customer sales to go up. For our new customer sales to go up. For our email list to go up. For our number of stores carrying Alegria to go up. For the number of stores reordering Alegria to go up. For our staff numbers to be able to go up as the balance in our accounts goes up. I believe in what the Word says, that the Lord owns the cattle on a thousand hills (that everything is His), and that we have not because we ask not (Jesus). So I'm asking the Lord today for UP.