All About Thai Silk Magic

Who Are We?

Hello or in Thai, “sawadee kha”,

My name is Amnuai Beckenham, the founder of Thai Silk Magic. For my friends and family they call me by my nickname, Dao. I am a very proud Thai lady and I thank you for visiting our Thai Silk Magic website.

I live with my Australian husband Peter, and our 2 daughters, Am and Wan, in the remote village of Ban Dong Yang, located in north east Thailand about 20 miles from the Cambodian and Laos borders.

Since moving back here from Bangkok some years ago, we have always had the burning desire to try to help our village people who live such desperately poor lives.

Please understand me, our village may be very poor financially but we are proud, hard working and fun loving people. And we are also wonderful hand weavers of Thai silk fabrics.

Thai Silk Magic has as its key mission, the improvement of the lifestyles of our financially poor weavers. We achieve this key mission by ensuring that Thai Silk Magic has fair pay principles and shares the profits, after expenses, with our village weavers.

Cultural Challenge

One of the biggest problems we faced as a family when trying to assist or give a helping hand to our friends and neighbours in the village was the cultural issue of “kreng-jai.”

This term literally means “fear + heart” but in everyday life it has several meanings of real importance to Thai people. "Kreng-jai" can mean “afraid of offending,”  "fear of creating inconvenience" and “fear of not being able to repay a courtesy or help”. It would be easy for us to help with some schooling fees or assistance with some basic necessities of life, but always the stumbling block was “kreng-jai."

However, our determination to help our village never wavered despite these hurdles and this burning desire really peaked in late 2008. We saw great saddness and many tears from some families who were withdrawing their children from the local village school because they had no money to pay the paltry school fees.

Cycle of Poverty

We had to do something now because education is one of the few ways to break the “cycle of poverty” faced in our village. Only recently we saw unbelievable excitement when one of the local school students qualified to go to university to study law. This was a real first for our village and a stunning reminder of the vital importance of education for these village children.

With our enthusiasm and desire to help well and truly confirmed, we quietly suggested to a group of village weavers the concept of a village group of silk weavers whereby we would set up a website to show and market to the world their superb 100% natural Thai silk fabrics.

At first there was some hesitancy as they really did not understand or appreciate the opportunities being discussed. But slowly and surely they not only gained an understanding of the concept but became unbelievably enthusiastic and excited about working as a team to create opportunities of lifestyle choices for the first time in their lives.

Thai Silk Magic is Born

By combining all our talents of international business consultancy (that’s Peter who is our mentor and go-to guy); supervision (that’s me using my experience from working with staff in international hotels) and traditional, hard working, hand-weaving skills (that’s our ladies and a few guys!), we overcame the issue of “kreng-jai” and established Thai Silk Magic group – our dreams of helping our village came one step closer to reality! Now we could help people to help themselves and that was very exciting. Click here for a quick video about The World of Thai Silk Magic - it opens as a new page.

Thai Silk Magic Key Mission

We have as our key mission, the improvement of the lifestyles of these financially poor weavers.

• We achieve this key mission by ensuring that Thai Silk Magic has fair pay principles and shares all the profits, after expenses, with our village weavers.
• The high quality Thai silk fabrics of our village weavers will have access to a world-wide market via their exclusive availability on our website.

Thai Silk Magic Objectives

Our objective is to ensure we create a win-win-win scenario:

• A win for you, our customer, by accessing our unique, high quality Thai silk fabric
• A win for the environment with our environmentally friendly and organically natural processes.
• A win for our village weavers, with the opportunity to improve their lifestyles

Our motto is "Woven by Hand, Straight from the Heart” and this is a perfect description of our organisation.

Our village is located in the heart of the Thai silkworm region and every piece of our Thai silk fabrics is unique and hand woven with great pride.

By integrating our group’s variety of skills, together with our focus on using natural dyes and eco-friendly processes, we are proud to make our Thai silk fabrics available to you. We know you will be delighted and maybe even surprised with what our village weavers can create!

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