Our Story

ABLE is a lifestyle brand focused on ending generational poverty through providing economic opportunity for women.

While living in Ethiopia, Barrett Ward saw firsthand how extreme poverty forced young women, generation after generation, to resort to prostitution as a means of supporting themselves and their families.

The goal was to provide an alternative that would give these women an opportunity to earn a living, empowering them to end the cycle of poverty that kept them trapped. Armed with multiple studies illustrating how the employment of women benefits and strengthens the entire community, the ABLE team set out on a mission to end generational poverty, one job at a time.

Because of your support, ABLE has grown from producing a single collection of hand-woven scarves to a one-stop shop for ethical fashion, offering leather goods, handmade jewelry, denim, clothing and footwear. Whether your purchase is produced in Ethiopia, Mexico, Peru, or at our headquarters in Nashville, TN, each item has one thing in common: because it is made by women, it is leading all of us a step closer to the end of generational poverty.

With your help, we are working each day to give opportunity to women in a safe and healthy environment and encouraging our peers to do the same.

As we have grown with you, our goals have evolved, deepened, and increased in ambition.

This growth has lead to the development of ACCOUNTABLE, a radical and disruptive reporting system that provides unparalleled transparency into the social impact of our employment and manufacturing practices, particularly the impact on women.

We want you to know the true impact of your purchase, and that can only happen with radical and disruptive transparency.

That’s why we decided to be the first company that we know of to publish our wages—the lowest wages of our workers, not the average. We believe in protecting and investing in women because we believe women will heal the world, and we want to empower consumers to have a quick and easy choice to demand change.

Only 2% of fashion workers make a wage that meets their basic needs, but if brands absorbed the cost of bringing workers to a living wage, it would likely only cost between 1-3% of the cost of the garment. When you put it that way, it doesn’t feel so insurmountable, and we believe that a radical shift can happen in the fashion industry if consumer demand pushes for it.