What If Your Holiday Shopping Could Change Someone’s Life?
What if your next favorite home find or holiday gift could look good, feel meaningful, and support a bigger mission? That’s the idea behind Joffa Marketplace, a Memphis nonprofit connecting shoppers with beautifully crafted goods made by artisans around the world. Image: Joffa Marketplace
What if your next favorite piece for your home, wardrobe, or gift closet could do more than just look good?
That’s the idea behind Joffa Marketplace, a Memphis-based nonprofit marketplace connecting shoppers with thoughtfully crafted goods, all made by artisans around the world. From jewelry and bags to home goods, tabletop pieces, and accessories, Joffa’s collection is full of the kind of pieces you might choose for their modern design and lasting quality — and treasure for the story behind them.
A Marketplace Built Around Impact
Joffa’s story began long before the marketplace launched in 2022.
While living in Cairo, Egypt, for seven years in the early 2000s, Founder and Executive Director Brandon Wells encountered small workshops working to strengthen under-resourced communities. The organizations were doing meaningful work, but many lacked the support and access they needed to grow their sales and, ultimately, their impact.
Now, Brandon works with Managing Director Jennifer Weston to connect artisan partners with customers who want to buy beautiful, well-made goods and support a bigger mission.
Joffa is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit marketplace. Rather than just donating a portion of sales, Joffa purchases products from its artisan partners at wholesale. That means the impact begins when Joffa places an order, while each customer purchase helps make the next order possible.
The People Behind the Products
Joffa vets every artisan partner to ensure fair, livable wages and safe working conditions. Just as importantly, each partner is focused on addressing a specific need within its community.
These needs range from helping people recover from trafficking to supporting refugees, fighting poverty, and keeping families and young people together. The result is a marketplace where every purchase represents so much more than a transaction.
According to Joffa’s 2025 Impact Report, the organization has worked with 67 artisan partner groups across 31 countries and five continents, generated more than 126,000 hours of fair-wage work, and shipped more than 10,000 orders since its founding. Today, that partner network has grown to 70 groups.
As Jennifer explains, “We saw the beauty of connecting our customers with our partners by telling the stories of redemptive work our partners are doing in the lives of artisans and their communities.”
Beautiful Things, Made With Intention
Joffa’s catalog includes jewelry, bags, home goods, kitchen and tabletop pieces, apparel, and accessories. While the products come from artisans around the globe, they share a common thread: beautiful design and craftsmanship, and a story worth knowing.
One partner, Shelma Bahadur of JOYN in Rajpur, India, describes the value of the partnership beautifully: “In a world that often rushes past the hands that make beautiful things, [Joffa] has chosen to slow down, to see, to value.”
Joffa’s orders provide hours of work for artisans creating functional pieces using time-honored techniques. In the process, that work helps preserve traditions that might otherwise be lost.
And every order includes a card sharing the story of the artisan maker behind the piece, turning a beautiful gift into something even more meaningful.
Now, Joffa Has a Memphis Home
Last year, the team set out to bring its Midtown office and Downtown warehouse together under one roof. Along the way, they found something they hadn’t necessarily been looking for: a space beautiful enough to welcome retail shoppers, too.
Now, Joffa has a new home in the Historic Broad Avenue Arts District, a neighborhood they love and that fits their focus on creativity, craftsmanship, and community.
The Joffa offices are upstairs, while the warehouse sits in the back; that’s where the team packs and ships every order. (And yes, local shoppers can choose free pickup when ordering online.)
Over the past year, Joffa has been experimenting with retail through pop-up shops in the space. And this holiday season, it will open its doors more frequently, giving Memphis shoppers a chance to see a sampling of the collection in person and discover the stories behind the pieces.
Beyond Fair Wages: Investing in Whole Communities
Many of Joffa’s artisan partners support their teams with counseling, accessible childcare, financial training, education, and medical care.
That matters because sustainable work can change much more than an individual worker’s circumstances. When artisans have reliable income and access to resources, the benefits can extend to their families and entire communities.
It shows that shopping ethically doesn’t mean giving up on style. Joffa proves that the things we buy for our homes or as gifts can be beautiful, useful, and meaningful all at once.
A New Chapter in Corporate Gifting
The organization recently hired its first full-time corporate gifting sales role and is looking to partner with more local businesses on custom gifts that don’t just say thank you, congratulations, or welcome — they also tell the recipient about the fair-wage work their gift helped support.
For businesses looking for a more thoughtful alternative to traditional corporate gifts, it’s a chance to make a gesture that feels personal while creating tangible impact.
Your Holiday Shopping List, With a Little More Meaning
You can browse the collection online at joffa.com, then place an order for local pickup. Or stop by during one of the upcoming holiday retail dates to browse the pieces in person.
Joffa’s Holiday Retail Hours
October
- Saturday, October 10, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Saturday, October 24 (Art Walk), 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
November
- Saturday, November 14, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Saturday, November 28 (Small Business Saturday), 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
December
- Fridays, December 4, 11, and 18, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
- Saturdays, December 5, 12, and 19, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
*Because Joffa is a small team, its retail hours are thoughtfully evolving. For the latest updates and future pop-ups, follow @joffa_official on Instagram.
Shop Beautifully. Know the Story.
At its heart, Joffa Marketplace is built on a simple idea: when we know the story behind what we buy, we can shop differently.
And here in Memphis, we can now experience that story in person.
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Ariel Taranski
Ariel's been writing professionally for over a decade, with a passion for travel, pets, good food, and a great book. She's lived in Memphis for over half of her life, a transplant from Florida and Southern through-and-through.
