As the saying goes, we started off our journey to help the women working in low income households whose lives were steeped into multi-dimensional poverty in terms of their inability to go out and work due to family/religious restrictions and their low-to-medium skill level as no one bothered to enhance their skills as they continued to do menial jobs with meagre earnings, and their over-dependence on middlemen (job-contractors to be precise) to feed them at their doorsteps limiting their access to trends and markets.
Things turned worse in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic when many of these women were anxious to run their households with their own earnings as many men had lost employment and stopped earning. We built on traditional craft skills of hand block printing, hand embroidery and handloom, as there was a huge scope to do value addition and premium pricing by showcasing intricate skill-work on household textiles, furnishings and apparel by making use of a rich repertoire of heritage crafts and legacy of using natural dyes and materials.
We are happy to share that our strategy paid off as we could make a quick headway into sophisticated domestic textile handicraft markets of apparel and home through our concerted efforts combining motivation, capacity development and institution building with aggressive offline marketing, branding and social media marketing.
Our women artisans have been the inspiration and the backbone of Social Asset Foundation, with whom we plan to grow and scale quickly, reaching out to new artisan clusters, new customers, and new geographies including foreign markets.
We are reaching out to one & all to be part of our story unfolding!
