When Ian Bentley and his wife, Brittany, moved to Ethiopia to adopt their daughter in 2011, they saw the mistreatment of women and girls in the East African nation firsthand. In the capital city of Addis Ababa, 150,000 women are in sex work and 26% of women in the region are unemployed.

Many people would have learned this and done nothing, but the Bentleys took the challenge into their own hands. They started engaging in conversations with the women they would meet and asking how they could help.

“Over and over again, we heard a lot of [these] women saying, ‘We don’t want handouts. We want jobs; we want opportunities,’” says Ian Bentley, co-founder of leather bag supplier and certified B Corp Parker Clay (asi/76164). “That really stuck with us.”

From there, the Bentleys started partnering with an organization that provided vocational and skills-development training for at-risk women in Ethiopia.

“That’s where we ultimately decided to start Parker Clay to create jobs for these women,” Ian Bentley says. “And then just happened to discover this incredible leather industry [in Ethiopia] as well.”

Now, more than a decade after its founding, Bentley joins Promo Insiders to discuss Parker Clay’s mission, its sustainability efforts and why more end-buyers are aligning themselves with promo companies that want to make a difference.