🌿 Shuttleknit | Our Mission, Strategic Ambition + Values
🌟 OUR MISSION
🧵 Empowering Irish Traveller women through craft, design, and enterprise.
We blend tradition + creativity to:
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Create sustainable livelihoods
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Challenge stereotypes
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Share Traveller culture with pride
🎨 Traditional skills → Contemporary design → Cultural pride
🚀 OUR STRATEGIC AMBITION
| 🌍 | We are building: |
|---|---|
| 🧶 | Ireland’s first Traveller-led heritage brand rooted in craft, storytelling, and sustainability. |
| 💡 | A creative pipeline training young Traveller women to become designers, entrepreneurs, and leaders. |
| ♻️ | A sustainable social enterprise model reinvesting profits into community, culture, and innovation. |
| 🗣️ | A Traveller-led voice in Irish design redefining how heritage, identity, and entrepreneurship are valued. |
✨ Our long-term vision:
#MAGGIE2035 — A future where Traveller women thrive as entrepreneurs, leaders, and cultural mavericks, building legacies for themselves and their daughters.
💛 OUR VALUES
| Icon | Value | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 📖 | Heritage Through Storytelling | Every product tells a story — celebrating Traveller traditions and Wicklow roots through design. |
| 🌱 | Creative Sustainability | Designing with care for people, culture, and planet — turning waste into beauty and keeping textiles in circulation. |
| 👨👩👧 | Family First | Reflecting Traveller culture through flexibility, respect, and balance between work and home. |
🌈 OUR IMPACT: 25 Years of Traveller-Led Innovation
(Use large infographics, minimal text, and simple icons — hearts, hands, yarn, trees, books, etc.)
👩🦱 EMPLOYMENT + LEADERSHIP
3 generations of Traveller women employed.
85% of our current team are Traveller women.
🌟 Women leading in production, embroidery, and business development.
Shuttleknit: A proven model of Traveller women’s leadership through enterprise.
🎨 CULTURAL RECOGNITION
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Keeping traditional craft skills alive while innovating with design.
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Products that tell cultural stories — like An Capall (The Horse).
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Challenging stereotypes and putting Traveller creativity into the mainstream.
🪡 Design as storytelling. Culture as power.
🏛️ POLICY INFLUENCE
📌 Demonstrating Traveller-led entrepreneurship in action.
📈 Offering a replicable model for other Traveller groups.
🤝 Showing policymakers what real inclusion looks like — led by the community, not imposed from outside.
🌺 NEXT GENERATION + LEGACY
✨ Inspiring younger Traveller women to see a future in craft and business.
🎓 Building a creative pipeline for daughters and the next generation.
🏆 Laying the foundation for Ireland’s first Traveller-led heritage brand.
#MAGGIE2035 — Building legacies, not just livelihoods.
🌍 ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT
♻️ Turning waste into one-of-a-kind homeware pieces.
🧵 Using eco-friendly yarns and creative reuse.
💚 Leading with initiatives like Knit Swap to keep textiles in circulation.
✨ 25 YEARS AHEAD OF POLICY
Shuttleknit has been quietly achieving what national and EU frameworks are only now aspiring to:
✅ Employment | ✅ Inclusion | ✅ Sustainability | ✅ Cultural Pride
“With the right space and support, Traveller women design and inspire change — 25 years ahead of policy, and still shaping the future.”
