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Marketing of Village Products
contents The Handicrafts and the Handlooms industry in India together engage about 16 million people and have a turnover of $5000 million. The huge profit margin, however, percolating through the layers of agents and traders, is transformed to a meager sum at the craftsmen end. There have been initiatives where the designers work together to address the contemporary market with innovative designs, e.g in Warangal, the dhurry weaving has been extremely profitable due to this designer intervention. Similarly in Etikoppaka, high quality wooden articles are being made using vegetable dyes. Recently there have been entrepreneurs who believe in fair trade and share the profit among the crafstmen. Although there have been a few portals addressing fair trade, most of these concentrate on trade outside the country. In this discussion, we would delve into the possibilities of a prototype Eshop (AID news April 25) which would provide a direct craftsmen to consumer link. We would also look into what possible items could be shipped out from India and the other marketing modalities. Have questions on this session? Please contact Sowmya Mahadevan. This session was put together in response to a note on this topic by BCT’s Suresh Baghavatula. The discussion was lead by AID-Pittsburgh volunteers, Ravi Arunachalam and Sowmya Mahadevan. About 20 volunteers from various chapters participated. Ravi and Sowmya circulated a hand out as background reading. One of the objectives of this session is to come up with ways to promote linking the buyer and the producer directly, thus avoiding the middlemen and promoting fair price both from the point of view of the consumer as well as the artisan. There is a need for such an initiative as the traditional non profit/ moderately profit-making outlets like the Khadibhandars and the Indian State and Central govt. sponsored crafts emporiums are not very successful in marketing their goods effectively. There’s bureaucratic inefficiency and a lack of enthusiasm among the sales people. Often the artisan ends up not getting fair wages or a thriving market for his/her produce. How can we help? Some suggestions that came up are listed below. Showcasing handicrafts from India and selling them directly. SANKALP, a group of grad. Students from Iowa State Univ., get individually goods from India and display and sell them at cultural fairs and ethnic gatherings. Another way is to perhaps start an e-portal that will allow selling of goods that are made by artisans from AID-supported villages and projects as well as from India in general. There should be professional approach in that we should be prepared to take back things if the customer is not satisfied etc. Details like where will we house the goods, how shipping is handled will become major concerns as we work out the details. One concern raised was that most people would like to see, touch and hold objects like artifacts before actually buying them and e-sites can’t really provide this kind of interaction. Another idea was to get the handicrafts from India directly and supply the portals with the stock. The idea is that it will circumvent the middlemen (we will become the middlemen). It was also suggested that big stores like Wal-Mart ad K-mart can be persuaded to have an ethnic section to sell these goods. Some cautioned that while we should try to facilitate interaction between the existing fair price portals and artisans in India, we should not get too involved as it may turn out to need more work than we can put in. We can also promote the already existing fair wage portals on our sites by giving them visibility and explaining what fair wages concept means. Action items:
Minutes recorded by Siva Digavalli
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