WESST Corp, the Women's Economic Self-sufficiency Team, is a nonprofit organization. Its mission is to facilitate the startup and growth of women and minority-owned businesses throughout the state of New Mexico. One of WESST Corp's major initiatives is the Marketlink program. This program is designed to provide meaningful sales and marketing skills to artisans who have viable existing products, but who possess limited ability to expand their sales arenas.

Wesst artisan, Rachel Miller, working on her craft

The Taos WESST Corp branch offers "MARKETLINK," a 45-hour sales and marketing training to area artisans. When the Taos WESST Corp was offered the chance to participate in the MIRA program they had already hosted two rounds of MARKETLINK training and had a strong basis with about forty active artisan clients. After some inquiry, it was decided that the third group of MARKETLINK trainees would also comprise the WESST MIRA Team. The team members decided to utilize the MIRA opportunity to support their business goals: to access new markets and to increase sales. WESST staff had been considering an e-commerce site for MARKETLINK artisans and the MIRA initiative was the perfect opportunity. The team members assessed their design and navigational needs for the site, and reviewed bids from several graphic designers and web programmers. They also took advantage of the MIRA workshops to work on their project and learn about e-commerce resources on-line. The team decided on a designer and programmer and WesstArtisans.com was born.

One of Rachel Miller's creations available on WesstArtisans.com

For the web site, each artisan wrote their own biography, artist's statement, product information and wholesale terms. Grant money was also used to take professional slides of the artisans' work. The artisans have been able to use the professional slides for other marketing purposes outside of the web site. From their MIRA efforts, the WESST team members learned how to professionally present themselves on the Internet. The WesstArtisans.com artisan group was invited to be on an international cable television show that features unique gift ideas on the Web. The group has decided to pass on the invitation at the current time, but they may reconsider it in the future when the have added more artisans' products to the site. Furthermore, the Children's Partnership Foundation is including WesstArtisans.com as one of five web sites in a case study profiling on-line community development projects. One of the WESST artisans was featured in the June 2001 issue of The Crafts Report, a prestigious craft publication, and in April 2001 WesstArtisans.com was covered in the New Mexico Business Weekly. WESST Corp has recently received grant funding from the American Express Company for ongoing support and plans to add artisans to the site this year.