The Provenance Standard
How a brand comes to appear in these pages, what we confirm before it does, and the few things that can never be bought here.
Every publication makes promises to its readers, whether or not it writes them down. We would rather write ours down.
Who we feature
Ochriva writes about brands founded and led by women and by people of color: Black, Indigenous, Latina and Latino, Asian American and Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian founders. We choose them for the singularity of their vision, never as a category to be filled.
Originality is the first test. We look for work that could only have come from its maker: a pattern drawn from a family archive, a technique carried across an ocean, a form that answers a question no one else thought to ask. Whether an object is shaped by hand at a studio bench or produced with a trusted manufacturer matters far less to us than whether it is conceived with intelligence and finished with care.
Quality is the second. We would rather feature nine brands that deserve the space than ninety that merely fill it.
What we confirm
Identity is never a marketing claim in these pages. Before we describe a brand as founded or owned by a particular person or people, we confirm it from the founder's own account and the public record, and we name our sources. We describe heritage in the words a founder uses for themselves.
Work described as Native American or Indigenous made carries legal weight in the United States under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act. We take that seriously. Before we describe any such work as Native made, we confirm it from the artist's own account of their tribal membership or certification.
Dispatches, our stories, are reported from the public record and from the brands' own words, and from conversation with the founders wherever they are willing to speak with us. Every source is named at the foot of the story.
What cannot be bought
Our editorial judgment is not for sale. The stories in Dispatches are chosen by our editors alone, and no brand can pay to appear in them or to change how it is described.
As Ochriva grows, we will welcome advertising and sponsored partnerships with brands we admire. They will always be clearly labeled as such and kept apart from our editorial, so you will never have to wonder which is which.
Some links on this site may earn us a small commission when a reader makes a purchase. That income helps keep the publication independent. It never decides what we write about.
When we are wrong
If we have made an error of fact, about a founder, a technique, a price, or a heritage, we will correct it promptly and note the correction at the foot of the story. Founders who wish to correct or add to anything we have written may write to us at any time.
That is the whole of the standard. It is short because it is meant to be kept.
