UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2002

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Extended Family

PROFILE: SWEATERS FOR PEACE

by Ben Barnhart




	DETERMINED TO HELP: Kathleen Mitchell '79 has turned her knitwear business into a lifeline for Bosnian women. Ben Barnhart photo.

KATHLEEN MITCHELL HANDLES THE COLOR snapshots as proudly as if the women in them were her sisters. Their square faces are sometimes smiling, sometimes painfully serious, their large hands shown in a ceaseless manipulation of knitting needles and the yarn in their laps, even as their eyes are focused on the camera or on each other.

Gathered at a home in Sarajevo, these survivors of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina are trying to rebuild embattled lives with a little help from Kathleen Mitchell. A 1979 alumna of the UMass School of Management, Mitchell employs these 20 women to hand-knit many of the sweaters she distributes in this country under her Snow Cabin Goods label. The cotton, cashmere, and alpaca wool sweaters are sold in boutiques from Maine to Seattle, as well as in some small mail order catalogs.

Mitchell founded Snow Cabin Goods six years ago after a career in domestic retail and office furniture marketing. (“Like watching paint dry,” she says.) She’d had fantasies of international marketing since her days at UMass, where she studied French, German and business administration, and that fantasy began to be shaped by her love of knitware. (“I feel a little emotional about sweaters. I know that sounds odd,” she says.) She began attending trade shows in Scotland, where she met knitters and suppliers, and began organizing the import and distribution network that became Snow Cabin Goods in her Norwood home.

THE PETITE AND SPIRITED MITCHELL seems to grow an inch or two when she speaks of the Bosnian women. “They’re sophisticated, worldly European women who have been stuck in a really crummy situation,” she says. Having read of the plight of such women, many of whom had lost husbands, sons, and brothers as well as homes and possessions in the war, she was determined to help in the best way she knew how: through her business.

Through aid agencies, the U.N., and the World Bank, Mitchell located a group of knitters who were coming together every day, partly as therapy, and who, with the help of non-governmental organizations, were just beginning to organize as a business. She met them in Sarajevo in 1998 – her first visit there, an addendum to her honeymoon with Steven Hirschberg ’77 – and it cemented her desire to help. She returned a year later with six duffel bags of yarn, needles, patterns, tape measures, eyeglasses, and anything else she could think of that the knitters could use in their enterprise, and began to pursue a business relationship with them.

“Even after a second trip I still wasn’t sure how much the first sweater was going to cost me,” says Mitchell. “But I thought, ‘If I don’t make any money, so what. It’s a phenomenal experience.’”
Last year about 700 Snow Cabin Goods sweaters were made in Sarajevo. Each carries a tag with the heading “Make a Difference,” explaining the relationship with the Bosnian women. The program offers the knitters a steady income and social contact, but also provides English language and computer training skills for them and their children.

MITCHELL STILL CONSIDERS SNOW CABIN Goods a “tiny little business” although she says the label’s gross sales may be in seven figures this year. She’s moved her office from home – she and Steve now share a beautifully remodeled house in Dover – to a space in Norwood. Her staff now numbers two-and-a-half, including her mother, who she likes to call “the general manager.”

But Mitchell would much rather talk about the heartening relationships she’s made through Snow Cabin Goods than about its financial success. After the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, she says, the concerned emails from European friends arrived immediately.

“The Bosnians said, ‘We understand how you feel because we lived it every day,’” recalls Mitchell. “That really tugs at you.”

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