I'd just like to give you a little of my background and how Brandaid Project came into existence.
I have spent the past 25 years working in the developing world, mostly in Haiti, on a number of mostly not-for-profit NGO sector projects. During that time, I noticed that poverty wasn't improving with the usual models of philanthropy and aid. In 2009, I founded a company called Brandaid Project. The other co-founder is the president of JWT Canada, a branch of the largest advertising agency in the world.
The Brandaid Project came into being from my observations that poverty needed marketing. It needs a lot of things, but it certainly needs marketing. Brandaid Project is a company that brings the high-powered marketing assets of Madison Avenue—big business advertising and marketing—to bear on the production export problems that producers have in the developing world.
We modelled the company in Haiti on a Haitian matrix, but it has replication in many other countries. We belong to the UNESCO's Global Alliance project, sharing best practice in the creative Industries, and intend to take the model that we created in Haiti to the 60 least-developed countries.
I will give you a brief history of what the Brandaid Project has accomplished in its brief time. We launched the company publicly in 2009 with two major events in the United States, sponsored by Vanity Fair magazine and Dior. This is very much in keeping with what the Brandaid Project does. We bring large corporate sponsorship interests and expertise in marketing into partnership with small and medium enterprise producers in the developing world. In this case, it's Haiti.
One of these two events was launched during Oscar week in Los Angeles, and the other during fashion week with Diane von Furstenberg in New York. We created collections of home decor products, and we showed those products in these two venues, with corporate celebrity and business guests in attendance. The model is intended to create marketing opportunities for small, otherwise anonymous, producers in developing countries. This went very well.
Then, the earthquake happened. Brandaid Project was about to become a UNESCO vehicle for this model to work in the 60 least developed countries. When the earthquake happened in Haiti, we decided, for company and personal reasons, to focus our attention in 2010 on Haiti. That's what we did.
What we did exactly was to look for purchase orders for the producers we had been working with. The purchase orders we found were with Macy's department store chain in the United States. Macy's is a 900-store chain. We brought Macy's buyers and designers to Haiti. They intervened with Haitian artisan producers in the home decor line, and produced 18,000 units of product in about six to seven weeks, three months after the earthquake, and during hurricane season. These products were finished and exported to the Macy's warehouse in New York, and events were convened by Macy's in 25 flagship stores.
This led to a purchase order in excess of $200,000. While we didn't do a baseline study on this particular project, we could see that this money and the portions of it that went directly back to these producers improved their lives substantially. It also created a brand called Heart of Haiti, which continues to be sold in Macy's stores, and is, in fact, expanding into more of their stores.
The Macy's order taught us many things. One is that there is a certain price point at which small producers in emerging economies can make money, and there is a certain price point beyond which it becomes a question of diminishing returns. Due to that Macy's order, Brandaid Project and Macy's received a good deal of media coverage in the United States as well as Canada. In fact, the story made it onto the front page of The Globe and Mail, where Minister Bev Oda saw what Brandaid was doing and noticed that it was a Canadian company—but mostly activated in the United States. We were contacted. We already had a proposal in with CIDA to launch several brands from Haiti. We felt that it was time to scale our model up, and that we could do a lot more with more resources.
The proposal that we had in with CIDA was subsequently approved, and for the last six months we have now been operating on a TFO CIDA grant project to launch 10 brands into the global market from Haiti. Four of these brands are community artisan brands. The other six are small to medium enterprises. That is to say, they are small to medium sized factories. The product line is home decor and home furnishings.
I'll bring you right up to date, and then I think that will be the 10 minutes.
This has led us to make some direct sales calls in Canada. We have subsequently acquired The Bay—The Hudson's Bay Company—as a customer. They're going to launch an integrated program based on the Brandaid project model sometime in 2012—I think in spring 2012. I just returned from London, England, the night before yesterday, where we had meetings with Selfridges, one of the biggest department stores in Great Britain. They have also agreed to an integrated program, which they're going to launch during design week next September in London. We also have secured a contract with Cirque du Soleil for product from Haiti, and for deeper collaboration with Haitian artisan communities.
That's our activity to date. I think things are going well with this CIDA contract. It runs through to 2013, and the commitment is that Brandaid Project will create a dollar number of export value for products from Haiti for these 10 brands. I won't give you the figure, because it hasn't been ultimately decided. So we're working hard to make that come true.
I think that's enough background. I'm happy to relinquish the floor, take questions, and whatever.