co/rizom

co/rizom is a Vienna-based organization that is creating a process designed to bring traditional crafts to a wider market and to ensure their long-term sustainability. At a time when interest in crafts is exploding but traditional making skills are vanishing, the methodology of co/rizom is to use design principles and product development methods as well as simple but effective branding and marketing strategies to help artisans form small social enterprises and become suppliers to retailers. Traditional crafts can only survive if communities of artisans are empowered and supported, enact fair employment practices, improve the quality of their products, and ensure the survival of context-specific skills and historic ways of making that might otherwise be lost forever.

In its current pilot projects, co/rizom is working with Maddalena Casadei and Wilfried Amanshauser in Albania, Aldo Bakker and Konstantin Schmölzer in Austria, mischer’traxler studio and Trish Malloch-Brown in Bosnia, Andrei Georgescu and Nadja Zerunian in Georgia, Marta Giardini and Gabor Nagy in Hungary, Chiara van Praag and Alina Serban in Romania, and Gilles Masse in Uzbekistan.