Celebrating all the incredible women today and every day
Happy International Women’s Day! Sending a loud and proud shout out to all the ladies in our amazing TROVE Community and beyond! We feel so incredibly lucky to have teamed up with women around the world who inspire us every day with their entrepreneurship, passion, grit, innovation, creativity, and drive.
There are many deep-rooted historic, cultural, and socioeconomic barriers that are working against gender equality. Today, we want to raise awareness about the inequalities and stereotypes about what women can and cannot do. We want to lift other women up, inspire and be inspired, and start charting a path to an inclusive world.
Our all-female roster of Chefs & artisans
We are so honored to have teamed up with 8 incredible female chefs and artisans around the world for our first four TROVE destinations: Florence, Italy, Kyoto, Japan, Seattle, Washington, and Chiang Mai, Thailand. All these women have shown incredible know-how and resilience in the face of the pandemic. Lack of tourism has deeply cut into the incomes in their respective businesses and they have all found ways to adapt, overcome and learn to adjust in order to thrive even during a tough time.
- Chef Mae Kuruphong is our Chiang Mai Chef and owns Buddha Raksa Nature Farm, where she teaches farm to table cooking and secret family recipes. In our Chiang Mai travels, we’ll also be visiting Elephant Nature Park, one of the world’s leading elephant conservation facilities founded by Sangdeaun Lek Chailert. Lek has dedicated her life to elephant conservation and has received worldwide accolades.
- Our Kyoto box featured Chef Aya Igano and Tea Expert Atsuko Mori. Chef Aya is co-founder of Eat Kyoto, leading an incredibly popular ramen cooking class, and Tea Expert Atsuko owns two tea shops where she helps share this ancient tradition and Kyoto with the world.
- For our special edition Holiday Box, which featured our hometown, Seattle, U.S. barista champion and coffee expert Sam Spillman shared her wealth of knowledge about coffee and showed us how to brew the perfect cup. Eat Seattle founder and chef, Liz Philpot, brings her Cordon-Blue training with fresh PNW ingredients and offers chef-led food and drink tours of Pike Place Market.
- In our very first TROVE trip to Florence, we learned to make a delicious Italian meal with Chef Patrizia Steccato and painted with renowned artist Betty Ritschel. We’re so grateful to both of these ladies who were our very first TROVE ambassadors, and have been champions and supporters of us throughout every step.
Incredible women who are raising the bar on quality and craft
- In our Chiang Mai box, our unique, reusable beeswax wraps hail from SABU-SABU Natural Lifestyle, a company founded by Virginia Bird. We also have a delicious, flavorful red curry from Thai & True, founded by Susie Kasem.
- Our Florence Valentine’s Day and date night box featured rose and tulsi tea from Big Heart Tea, a woman-owned company dedicated to ethically sourcing ingredients to make delicious tea. We’re also huge fans of woman-owned Seattle Chocolate the talented Talia Baiocchi and Leslie Pariseaus who authored “Spritz,” our favorite cocktail book featured in our Vday and date night box.
- Girl Meets Dirt founder Audra Lawlor brought us delicious preserves in our Seattle Holiday Box, sourced from her farm in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.
- Husband and wife duo from Natural OliveWood made the beautiful mortar and pestle set for our Chiang Mai Box. The watercolor set for our art class in Florence was from Bright Stripes, another husband/wife duo.
Celebrating women every day!
We could go on forever talking about our inspirations, but the important thing is that women are awesome, and we learn more every day from these trailblazers.But if there is anything we’ve learned from the uncertainty of this past year, it’s that we should never take anything for granted. So, be sure to take time today (and every day) to appreciate the women in your life that inspire you!