Building an efficient supply chain in rural India is tricky --- to say the least.
Social enterprises often want to have ethical sourcing, and help the folks who make their products earn a better living, work in kinder conditions, and have access to healthcare and education. It’s at the core of the Fair Trade ideology. But ensuring that happens is easier said than done, especially when you’re dealing with the pothole-ridden roads of India and a calendar that’s chock-a-block with festivals and religious holidays (meaning offices closed, artisans communities on break).
Navroze Mehta has that vision. And he raised $5 million to make it happen.
Along with his daughter Sonali Mehta Rao, Mehta launched Mela Artisans, a US-based company that sells handmade products by artisans in India. The idea stemmed from their travels as a family.
Mehta is a global soul: born in England, raised in Bombay, worked in Europe, and for the last 30+ years, has been based in the US. But he routinely takes his family back to India for vacations; on these trips, he started buying local handmade products from artisans.
The reality is, though, that while Mehta and his family may have been admirers of these products, handicrafts is a struggling industry in India. In a fast-paced world, demanding quick turnarounds, large volumes, and low costs, artisans -- be it in the bone, wood, or textile industries -- have really struggled to keep up.
Some of the biggest hurdles facing the handicraft sector include competition from machine-made products in China, shortage of skilled labor, and changing customer preferences.
That’s what spawned the father-daughter duo to start a company together, one that would help artisans, who are often paid less than $5 a day, find new markets for their wares.
Technology, Mehta says, makes the job of connecting the dots easier.
“In today’s day and age, why can’t we connect these markets?,” he asks, sitting in Delhi where the company’s India office is based.
Fair enough. But how do you build that supply chain, given all its challenges?
Technology is a big component of Mela Artisans’ model, he says. But technology is a rather broad term. He’s referring to melaartisans.com, their online shop for customers, which is the end product -- a marketplace of the startup’s uniquely designed pieces made by the artisans.
On the ground, he’s referring to simple, but ingenious innovations like WhatsApp, which lets him communicate with his team in India easily.
The logistics of doing a business like this 20 years ago would have been daunting, he says, relying on long-distance calls in vastly different time zones and faxing data back and forth.
Now, Mehta walks around with two cell phones while traveling in India -- one to keep his US number alive and ticking while he’s on the road and the other, a local Delhi number, to talk to suppliers. But what works best in India? WhatsApp.
Mehta communicates with his India Director Prasad Vaidyanathan via WhatsApp, which works better in Delhi than text messages and phones calls (call dropping is a big headache in the city since reception can be spotty).
The India team uses it constantly too. They send designs for products, inquiries, even order details via WhatsApp. When they’re in the field, often in areas well beyond Delhi where 3G connections are weak or non-existent, WhatsApp makes communication easier.
But technology is an enabler. How does Mehta find the artisan groups, and pick specific ones the company wants to work with?
Impact has a lot to do with it.
“Where we can really help improve the quality of life and bring in some much needed capital,” he says.
For instance, Kashmir, a state that’s been deeply entrenched in border politics since Independence, and thus, the economy has constantly wavered. In recent years, news of riots and curfews, have threatened tourism, Kashmir’s largest draw. Kashmiris have had it rough, especially those living outside the tourism hubs of Srinagar, Pahalgam, and Gulmarg.
That’s why Mela Artisans, Mehta says, was keen on working with a group of artisans who specialized in crewel embroidery, a type of hook embroidery that dates back to the 1400s. In Kulgam, about 70 km from Srinagar, an enterprising group of young women operate under the guidance of a local not-for-profit, Hunarmand (which means “skillful”).
Tasleema Akhter is one of these women. She started sewing and doing crewel embroidery at 8, as a hobby. Her family reared cattle to make a living. Now, in her 20s, she’s able to make a steady income from the art. Moreover, she’s training younger women, and overseeing the efforts of the group. She regards work as “worship,” she says.
Mehta met Akhter and the group through AAICA, a Delhi-based non-profit that’s helping Indian artisans find international customers. It seems to be working. The Kashmiri group has reportedly multiplied their sales by 30: from $2,000 to $60,000 in just a couple years.
Mela Artisans sells pillows with the crewel embroidery from Kashmir. The product and the story has been a hit, Mehta says.
In fact, by contemporizing some of these traditional techniques, Mela’s collections have found their way into US retailers like Neiman Marcus and Dillards, as well as being featured online at Popsugar.com.
But Mehta wants to build this out further. He wants to add a new artisan group from a new locale in India each year.
For instance, he recently discovered Porgai, a group of women who do a tribal form of embroidery in the Sittilingi Valley, which sits west of Pondicherry in South India.
Dr. Lalitha who oversees the group is a doctor by day, but an advocate for artisans in her spare time. She saw that only two women in the Lambadi tribal group, which occupy areas of the Valley, were able to do this unique stitching. Before it disappeared and went extinct, she set up a program to train more women.
Not only has it helped preserved the art, but it’s giving these families an income, she says, which is important since they’ve been hit by drought in recent years, forcing agricultural families to the city to look for work.
Mehta is deeply moved by these stories. “This is why we started the company,” he says, “ to use business as a way to truly support these communities.”
Most days, though, he’s bogged down in less glamorous details of running a business in India: shipment delays, transportation hiccups, improperly packaged merchandise. There is no shortcut, he jokes.
In the long run, it will be worth it, he says. "If one day Mela has successfully created a bridge from the artisan's village into every household in the developed world, then we will have accomplished our goal."
