Kansas City transplants Kirsten and Raúl Reyes own Beyond Borders Collective, a local business that partners with international artisans to produce high-quality blankets and accessories.
The company’s most popular offering is a line of Ecuadorian blankets made from recycled acrylic. Ecuador is Raùl’s home country, and it’s where the couple met. The blankets are designed and manufactured by artists in Ecuador and named after Ecuadorian towns. Other offerings—from 100-percent alpaca blankets to leather wallets—come from artisans in Peru, Türkiye, and Kansas City. You can buy their products online or locally at Ulah.
We spoke with Kirsten about Beyond Borders Collective’s products, the company’s connection to Kansas City, and her experience as a small business owner. Her responses are edited for length and clarity.
On the materials Beyond Borders Collection uses:
The Ecuadorian blankets are made from post-consumer recycled acrylics. We love the fact that they work that way. The blankets are lasting, sustainable, and easy to care for. Just pop them in the machine, then tumble dry low—though I personally like to hang dry them.
Our Peruvian blankets are 100 percent alpaca or a blend between alpaca and wool. Those aren’t machine washable because they’re natural fibers, but the amazing attribute of the blankets is that they’re hypoallergenic and they’re excellent insulators for both heat and cold. They’re also low in static electricity, they’re odor-resistant, and they naturally don’t hold a lot of bacteria.
We love the partners we’ve worked with in Peru because they educate the farmers on how to shear the alpaca properly. The alpacas roam free for miles and miles on farmland, and the farmers make sure they have the best quality feeding on the ground. The value of the alpaca’s life determines the value of the blanket.
We even partnered with an artisan in Kansas City—Foxtrot Studio—to produce leather wallets. So we’re always looking for opportunities to partner with people, whether it’s locally or around the globe. That’s what our vision is.
How Beyond Borders Collective came to Kansas City:
My mom is originally from Kansas City. I have a bunch of family here, and I grew up always coming here for holidays and summer vacation. Worlds of Fun, I know like the back of my hand. So this place has always been a second home to me.
I went to Ecuador a lot for volunteer work and mission work, and that’s when I met Raúl. And after we got engaged and started this business together, we moved to the States and wanted to find a place where we could really settle in and see opportunities where our small businesses could expand and have local support.
We were thinking, originally, that we could see a lot of growth in California. But when the pandemic hit and we understood the reality of taxation for small companies, we realized that wasn’t going to be a good fit.
We got married in Kansas City, and my husband really loved this city, and I’ve always loved it. So we felt at home, and we felt like Kansas City was going to be the better move for us. We’ve got family here, and they seem to really support local small businesses, and that’s huge for a small business to be in a community that understands what it means to support local small businesses. So we decided to make that move in the middle of the pandemic, and we were able to see growth and meet some really great people, like Ulah, and be able to partner with them.
On Kansas City for a small business owner:
I love when people get excited when we’re talking with them face to face and say, “Oh, my gosh, you’re a local small business, I love that? What do you do? We love supporting local small businesses.” I find that refreshing and so encouraging.
The only disconnect I see is when people see that the product isn’t made here locally. Some people prefer locally made instead of local small business. That’s been the hard thing for us to navigate: helping people understand that we’re contributing to the economy here as a local small business—and not only are you supporting the local economy, you’re supporting us, and you’re supporting something even bigger, beyond the local community. You being a customer with us is not only supporting a local small business, but it’s supporting artisans around the world.