How to Put Your Money Where Your Cause Is

The heart of New York's Madison Square Park has become a unique hub where talented designers and artists bring products to a wider market. Now one of the area's boutiques offers even more reasons to shop: 10 percent of the purchase price is donated to charity.

"We wanted to create a new retail concept that incorporated our three areas of expertise: fashion and lifestyle curation, brand direction and graphic design, [and] charitable causes and ethical consumerism," Maison 10's bi-continental founders Tom Blackie, Henri Myers, and Carsten Klein told The Advocate in a joint statement.

Maison 10 carefully curates its products to offer a limited number of items for sale at any one time. Specifically they hand-select 10 items, one each from 10 set categories; which include art, fragrances, home wares, jewelry, men's accessories, books, and "well-being" products. Each set of items is featured in the storefront for 10 weeks.

"Curating items that we love into small groupings of 10 made perfect sense to us," Blackie says. "And building everything else around the number 10 to create our concept just flowed naturally from that! By changing and updating our selections every 10 weeks, we felt it would keep the concept fresh and [invite] customers to return."

Customers get to choose which one of 10 charities will receive the 10 percent donation. The options include the LGBT elders organization SAGE and Housing Works -- which helps the homeless (and people with HIV).

"Our dream for the future is to open 10 stores in 10 different cities around the world and to make Maison10.com the destination online retail site for the ethical consumer looking for an incredible curation of lifestyle and design items," says Myers.