Magalie Noel Dresse (above left) was just 10 years old when she realized the powerful role she could play connecting artisans in her native Haiti to a global marketplace. “From the time I was quite young, I would spend every summer in Hopatcong, New Jersey,” Noel Dresse says from her headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. As a teenager, she would work summer jobs — like at a photo booth in her local mall — but by then she’d already begun trading between her two homes, supplying her friends in New Jersey with key chains hand-carved by Haitian artisans.

In 2006, Noel Dresse assumed ownership of Caribbean Craft, which acts as a global evangelist for over 100 Haitian artisans. By this time, Noel Dresse was not just a committed entrepreneur — she had earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering, followed by a master’s degree in marketing from New York University. This made her unusually skilled in understanding and resolving inefficiencies in artisans’ process.

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Fixing them, she says, has resulted in profound improvements in those artisans’ efficiency and earnings. “What I discovered when I took over the company in 2006 was how the lack of systems was holding it hostage,” Noel Dresse says. “I knew that we needed to put the emphasis on efficiency — and in doing so, find ways to make the artists make more money. We would have a situation where it might take an artisan three days to finish a piece — so it was impossible to be competitive. We had to break down these processes, so that now they’re able to make very decent money.”