In 1996-’97, Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS), a rural women’s collective of 10,000 members, of whom 1,200 are traditional craftswomen, faced a difficult situation: they had to develop an independent market for the embroidery, appliqué, patchwork and doll-making craftswomen members. Set up in 1989, through a collaborative initiative of the Gujarat State Handicrafts Development Corporation, Jan Vikas (an Ahmedabad-based Development Support Organisation) and Gujarat Women’s Economic Development Corporation, KMVS has been working for empowerment of rural women and their socio-economic development in remote areas of Kutch District.
Though craft development had been a focal activity, having its own marketing set-up was not a concern for KMVS, as the craftswomen were working with the Gujarat State Handicrafts Development Corporation, The corporation was providing the artisans work and procuring from them for sales through their outlets, ‘Gurjari’, set up in the metro and mini-metro cities of India. This arrangement worked till 1996, at which point markets started drying out and regular orders and procurement from the state handicraft development corporation came down to a trickle.
By this time, KMVS had organised around 1,000 craftswomen, who were geared up and empowered for production; they had almost become secure with a secondary income they could get from the corporation orders. Before KMVS’s efforts, they were being exploited by middlemen, getting a paltry sum for the beautiful work they produced. Becoming organised under the KMVS banner, they worked hard to establish producer groups, and working as a collective they had been able to confidently take their activity to a level where they were proudly able to work as artisan entrepreneurs and not as piece/wage-rate workers to middlemen.

Now, the issue was to have a marketing system that could generate sustainable work for these 1,000 artisans. The history of the tradition of embroidery in Kutch was that this beautiful work was never meant for the markets! Women would embroider garments for themselves and for their daughters’ dowries. In the late fifties and sixties, the embroidery and patchwork products slowly started coming out to the markets. Visitors to Kutch were fascinated by the dazzling beauty of the craft, and started offering money to buy them from the villages. Leather artisans and other craftspeople from Kutch, who started going out to fairs and exhibitions, saw an opportunity in selling this craft. They turned into middlemen, paying the real craftswomen a meagre amount for the painstaking work they did and pocketing most of the realisation as their profit. By the seventies, there was a deformed market growth for this work, and the women, who were caught in constant drought situations, turned to doing embroidery for a supplementary source of income to support their families. This unplanned growth resulted in rampant commercialisation of the craft and the artisans were caught in a vicious cycle of low payment and poor quality, which finally led to a collapse in their markets. Lack of market access, information and mobility kept the artisans that way.
Gradually, interventions like Gurjari, Shrujan, KMVS, Kala Raksha, Dastkar, SEWA, and others started changing the situation for them and helped in getting improved returns for the work they did, reversing the trend of commercialisation. By this time though, much damage had already been done and to get a renewed sustainable interest in markets for the embroideries of Kutch became difficult even for these organised initiatives.

Coming back to the situation KMVS faced in 1996: Gurjari was no longer in a position to place regular orders and on the other hand, the craftswomen had also started articulating that they were fed up with doing the low value, repetitive kind of work that they had to do for such markets. There was no space for the artisans who had high skills and a rich tradition to express their own creativity.
It was in this context that the market initiative for KMVS craftswomen was set up under the brand name of ‘Qasab’ (craft skill) in 1997. Since so many groups were already operating from Kutch, working with embroideries, and since they had started facing a glut in the narrow marketplace, the challenges were many for one more initiative to establish itself. Thoughtless commercialisation of the embroidery craft by middlemen and traders since the seventies had already taken its toll and the markets had been almost lost. The interest and fascination that had been generated in the seventies and eighties had not been consolidated in a meaningful way.
Marketing of crafts has to be done with passion, highlighting the human effort and the meaning and significance of the traditions behind making each craft piece. Qasab was not meant to be just an income generation project for women. It wanted to highlight the rich traditions of the different embroiderer communities in Kutch and to create an identity for each of their styles. ‘Kutchi embroidery’ was a generic term and also commonly described mirror-work. Then some of the work started getting identified such as ‘Rabari embroidery’, ‘Banni embroidery’, etc. Qasab wanted to create not only a market, but also bring out all these different embroidery traditions in its full glory. It wanted to incorporate the designing skills of the craftswomen and make them evolve their tradition to making contemporary lifestyle products. The work they did was to be an expression of their pride as craftswomen, transferring their art and craft to different products for the markets to enable them to sell their skills with dignity; away from a situation where they had to sell their personal and family dowry embroideries for money in times of need.
Strong with this belief, the search started for finding appropriate markets for their craftwork. The approach taken was to create new markets rather than compete for a share in the already difficult existing markets. More important, this had to be sustainable and result in generating continuing work and income for the artisans. A sustainable market is the biggest challenge facing the crafts sector today.
To keep the market channels going, lot of efforts have to go in terms of design development, quality management, reliability, consistency of all these and also if not to be competitive, at least not to out-price the products. Many times, interest is generated in the markets for crafts, but it is lost out fast due to a lack of sustained efforts for maintaining balance of these factors. Most of the efforts in promoting crafts have lost out mainly due to these reasons in the long run.
Moreover, just like product diversification, market diversification is very important. Most of the times there is intra-competition amongst artisans and craft groups from the same area or region, not to speak about the invariable inter-competition amongst producers from different parts of India. Unfortunately, a very narrow market has been developed for the crafts sector and all roads lead to the same market places such as Dilli Haat or a few boutiques, stores, emporia, etc. that sell craft products mainly in the metro cities of India. Widening the market base and creating new markets is the crucial step that is required for growth of the crafts sector. With globalisation, lots of opportunities are opening up for export markets, which should be tapped.
Also, sustained efforts have to be made for creating awareness in the markets about the difficult and intricate processes that artisans do to create the beautiful craft product. The most common refrain on seeing craft products is ‘it’s expensive’. This is a mindset that can be changed by presenting the processes behind making of a craft product. The perception changes the moment people are aware of the amount of efforts that have gone into the making of the piece.
The author has argued many a time with customers about this mindset, and asked them why they do not feel this way when spending huge amounts on buying branded lifestyle products and garments; why do they not calculate the cost of the material and the end price they pay for buying such products and why this attitude when looking at, or assessing a craft product. So, similar to branding of ‘company’ products, an image has to be created in the market and an awareness about what it takes to make a hand-crafted product. The selling line has to be: better return to artisans, better value-for-money to customers.
Craftspeople also have to remember this and never to compromise on quality, thus giving true value-for-money to their customers. In Fair Trade, we have to be fair to all involved; it is just not that the markets only have to be fair to craftspeople, they have to be fair to the customers too.
The future presents a lot of opportunities to the artisans as more and more people the world over are turning ‘back to basics’. With growing connectivity, networking and sensitivity for Fair Trade, there exists a vast potential. The key is not to lose heart and focus on presenting good quality craft products and be noticed – make the work marketable. Then craftspeople will not have to go looking for markets; the markets will go looking for them.