In a long chain, the maker is paid for the piece and the trader carries the risk of selling it. That sounds fair until the piece is made in a season when the trader is not buying, or when the material was purchased on credit at the start of the work.
The first thing a direct order changes is the timing. A milestone structure, raw material advance, golden sample, batch, inspection, dispatch, puts money into the household while the work is in progress rather than after it is finished.
The second is what gets made. A trader buys what sold last year. A contract buyer specifies a drawing, a colourway and a size, which means the cluster learns a new product rather than repeating an old one.
The third is traceability. When the order is direct, the cluster name, the cooperative, the material source and the test reports can be written on the same sheet as the invoice. When it is not, the buyer receives a label and nothing behind it.
What we do not claim: that direct trading raises incomes by a fixed percentage, or that every household in a belt works for us. An earlier version of this site printed cooperative and artisan counts per belt; we could not find a document behind them, so those numbers have been withdrawn rather than restated here.
What we do claim is narrower and checkable. Every record on this site states either a published price tier or the words quoted on the brief, and nothing is estimated on the page. If the sheet is silent, we say so and ask the cluster.
Direct trading is a story about when the money arrives, not about villains.
