Word: purser
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Asia is crisscrossed with the footprints of foreigners who went there with the glorious dream of ruling a kingdom in the forest, like the hero of a Conrad tale. Most of them end up hustling condos in Phuket or Bali, or eventually head home for a real job. Warwick Purser, a tall, lanky, ginger-color man from Sydney, has made the dream a reality. Seven years ago, when the peripatetic entrepreneur established Out of Asia, Indonesia's largest exporter of handcrafted goods, he set up shop in the village of Tembi, half an hour's drive from Yogyakarta. Today, Purser...
...Purser's guiding philosophy is what the British call doing well by doing good: as he enriches himself, he has made it his parallel goal to create a prosperous community of Javanese artisans. Now in his late 50s, Purser says that when he moved to Tembi in 1995, there were no roads and few jobs. "A lot of people had moved away to find work in the cities," he says. When he started Out of Asia, he surveyed the skills of the village's 800 people "with the objective of creating a job for at least one member of every...
...surpassed that goal. Today, Tembi has the cheerful feel of a tropical Victorian Utopia, a model community in the tradition of William Morris, with Purser cast in the role of philosopher-king. Evidence of the village's global reach and newfound affluence are everywhere. Purser says he pays above-average wages, and he established a foundation to distribute some of the profits to the townspeople. Thus far, the foundation has created a health clinic, a gamelan school and a simple fitness center. The company pays for school uniforms and books. After two years of service, an unmarried employee gets...
...Despite his good works, Purser is not purely an idealist. He's also a shrewd businessman. He first saw Indonesia during a 1968 honeymoon in Bali. He stayed for 12 years, starting a guide service that grew into Pacto, which, he says, "was and is the largest travel company in the Republic of Indonesia," with a staff of 500. When the government changed the law, prohibiting foreigners from owning businesses in that sector of tourism, Purser accepted a job with the U.N. Development Program and served a stint as director general of tourism in Vanuatu...
...style," he says. Evidently so: Out of Asia goods are carried in ?lite stores and mass-market chains in Europe and the U.S., among them Macy's and Harrods. Although precise revenue figures from the private firm are unavailable, he's currently expanding with a new venture called Warwick Purser Lifestyle, selling housewares and furniture in department stores and boutiques throughout Asia...