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Walking down Main Street in downtown Pleasanton, it’s hard to miss ShopConsciously, an artisanal gift store that sells ethically sourced products such as handbags made from recycled bottles by women in Kenya, Africa.
Nestled between the Shokoor Art Gallery and Middle 8 bar, the unique gift shop first opened in 2024 by owner Mpho Hansjee who said she wanted to find out a way to promote the work of her nonprofit, Women Enabled Enterprises, which focuses on helping low-income, women of color artisans in African countries build up their own small businesses.
“We are trying to help them become self-sufficient,” Hansjee told the Weekly. “We’re helping them build their business … but also we’re helping them find their client base here.”
But since she opened the brick-and-mortar downtown, Hansjee said running a store while managing everything else in her life has proven to be more difficult than what she imagined, which is why she recently made the decision to convert her store into the city’s first entirely self-service gift shop.
Hansjee and her husband moved from South Africa to the United States in the early 2010s, settling in San Jose for her husband’s job. Originally, the couple did not intend to stay for longer than two years, but one thing led to another and the two decided they wanted to stay.
Hansjee then began working in retail, specifically at the corporate Ross office in Dublin, helping major companies grow their retail category so that customers would buy more of their products. She said that while she enjoyed her work, in the back of her mind she always wanted to do something to give back to her home country.
When her mom died in 2015, Hansjee said she realized life was too short not to pursue her dreams. At the time, she realized she loved helping companies become more successful and liked figuring out customer buying trends.
In the following years, she worked on marrying those two passions through the formation of Women Enabled Enterprises. According to Hansjee, the nonprofit’s goal is to provide low-income women of color artisans in African countries with the resources necessary to launch or grow their businesses.
But around 2021, Hansjee said she still felt like she could do more to help these up-and-coming artisans. She said she realized a lot of her clients simply did not have enough of a customer base to survive, which is when she first got the idea to open a shop where she could resell her clients’ products.
At first, she began to resell these products online but eventually, she tried opening her first shop in Portland, Oregon. When that did not work out, she did not quit.
She eventually landed in downtown Pleasanton, at 310 Main St., Suite E, in October 2024. Since then, she said the shop has been fairly successful in opening up a whole new world of African artisans to the Pleasanton community.
“I loved meeting everybody, everybody loved meeting me, they loved hearing the story about all the products so that location grew and we were just excited to be here,” Hansjee said regarding the Pleasanton store.
Through ShopConsciously’s model, Hansjee said her clients now have access to a whole new market of customers and Pleasanton residents and downtown patrons are able to support African women on the other side of the world who truly care about their crafts.
However, running her own store hasn’t been easy. Hansjee said that before the gift store converted into its current self service model, she was really only able to open the store during the weekend and during limited, and at times, sporadic hours.
She said the store was not at a place financially where she could afford to hire employees to run the store when she wasn’t free, even though she heard nonstop from residents who wished the store would be open.
So after opening a hybrid, self-run kiosk at the San Jose Mineta International Airport this past August, she decided to try and bring that same self-service model to the Pleasanton location, which officially took effect on Nov. 14.
Now with the shop being open more often throughout the week, Hansjee said that she hopes more people can experience and check out the unique products that are offered at the gift store, without her having to physically be there.
“(Pleasanton is) so tight-knit and close and family-oriented that for a lot of the people, they’re just excited that I get to do a little bit more in life … and I can pick up my kids from school and take them to their activities, while I’m still able to give the community what they want, which is meaningful gift giving,” Hansjee said.
As for the lack of human interaction, she said she wasn’t too worried about losing that connection with customers because there are videos and pictures of the artisans that tell their stories and how buying their product will go directly to supporting their small business.
“What we’ve done is we’ve made sure that we don’t lose the story because a human isn’t there,” Hansjee said. “Those pieces that have a story attached to it, we make sure that there is visual storytelling around that product.”
