This all started with a dream that came true: in 2003 I delivered my first truck load of school supplies to a Mongolian rural school for Globetrucker, a fully volunteer, non-for-profit organization. Once empty, I had to find a return load for my truck and purchased a few Mongolian yurts which I hauled back to my home country, Switzerland. They sold fast and helped finance the next school deliveries to Mongolia. The yurt business was then separated from the non-for-profit organization, but still finances today parts of Globetrucker.
I have since moved to Canada and the yurts have followed. Groovyyurts was created. Still today, we try to source most of our material from the Mongolian country side to support rural economy. We strongly believe that a profitable business can be developed sustainably. We also support a few local development projects, in particular two women cooperatives whose felt products can be found in our catalogue. We have opened our own tree nursery, growing 5 trees (actually quite a lot more) per yurt sold over 3 years before having them planted on the land.
In Mongolia we work with two families to produce the yurts and two more for the furniture. To insure quality and follow-up, we work close together with our friends from Mongol Yurt who sell the same yurts in other parts of the world.
Here in North America, the small Groovyyurts family is made mostly of our distributors, like Guillaume and Eric in Quebec, Raphael in Ontario, Richard & Stephanie in California, Brad in BC, Denison in Montana or Trent in Alberta.
Call me if you want to join!
Yves Ballenegger
Groovyyurts’ founder and owner
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