SuVyapar’s Quilts Weave an Artisan Revolution
In Rajasthan, a rural woman crafts a brightly colored, handmade cotton quilt in return for a handful of rupees. Half a world away in a high-end store, the same quilt is sold for $150. How fair is that?
A San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur — unhappy at the way the global supply chain puts more money into the pockets of middlemen than the craftspeople themselves — is betting that shoppers will try a new system that funnels profits straight back into India’s villages and communities.
With Sanjay Bhargava’s novel business plan, buyers in America can get the exact same quilt for only $65 (a portion of which is even tax-deductible), while the craftspeople earn more than twice as much income for their work.
Bhargava calls his social entrepreneurship project SuVyapar (”good trade” in Hindi). SuVyapar “connects these rural artisans and their communities to the enormous American consumer market through an innovative process that reduces friction in the entire logistics and marketing chain,” states the company’s business plan.
The artisans, in turn, directly benefit from SuVyapar through the company’s unique micro-finance program that pays them over twice what they would earn from a corporate chain, said Bhargava.
SuVyapar currently offers quilts in five color schemes, all printed in Indian motifs: Southwest Tones of mehndi and mustard yellow; the Savanna Collection in cool green and white; Desert Flames, striped in earth tones; the Black Magic Collection in crisp black and white; and “Grandma’s Favourite,” red roses on a soft pink background.
Each quilt is hand-stitched of soft cotton voile, and features a different pattern and border on each side. The quilts were crafted in Jaipur and sent to New Delhi, where they were shipped to a warehouse in the Bay Area (to keep shipping costs low for U.S. customers).
Prices average $65 per quilt plus $5 shipping, and all transactions are handled on eBay.
“The whole idea is to get more money back into the hands of the producers,” SuVyapar founder Sanjay Bhargava told India-West June 3.
Bhargava, a Fellow in the Reuters Foundation Digital Vision program at Stanford University, is working with Stanford students to raise awareness for an ambitious business prototype he calls a “community friendly movement,” with billion-dollar potential.
“The goal of the e-commerce prototype is to conclusively prove that it is commercially viable for India to have a minimum of $1 billion in e-commerce exports to the United States by 2005,” said Bhargava.
“If our dream of helping 10,000 communities by selling $1 billion annually and raising $200 million to improve communities is realized, it will be awesome,” he added. “It will take four to five years, but it can be done if a grassroots movement takes hold.”
SuVyapar aims to sell $300,000 worth of crafts by the end of June, and has started a novel promotion to drum up interest — free laundry for a year for one lucky college student anywhere in the United States.
Each visitor to the company’s Web site (www.suvy.com) gets one entry into the contest, and visitors who make a purchase — or sign up friends and family who make their own purchases — get 10 entries. A drawing will be held after June 30 to determine the winner.
However, explains SuVyapar team member and Stanford student Ramit Sethi, “This project isn’t really about getting free laundry. It’s about creating a new prototype that could help millions of rural artisans to continue their tradecraft.”
The idea of selling globally sourced handicrafts over the Web is not a new one, and companies such as Novica.com are already doing robust business by featuring the work of individual artisans in the same space. What makes SuVyapar’s approach unique, explains Bhargava, is that the business benefits “not just rural artisans, but also their surrounding communities through our innovative microfinance plan” (italics his). Indeed, Novica.com chief executive officer Roberto C. Milk has already begun a dialogue with SuVyapar to see how the two companies can work together.
Bhargava sees SuVyapar as an “open-source” startup development, and he encourages other entrepreneurs to use his plan as a base from which to scale up companies of their own. “This is a startup opportunity being developed in the public domain with no patents,” he explained. “Patents for business methods are in my opinion an abomination.”
Bhargava earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from IIT Bombay and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad, and was a founder of the online payment company PayPal. Bhargava now heads Transfinium, an online financial services company, and lives in the Northern California community of San Carlos with his wife and children.
“Nonresident Indians are a powerful buying group that can be motivated to buy from Indian merchants and help develop India economically as long as they get good products,” he said. “And the innovative idea is, how can we improve these artisans’ lives?”
January 28th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Focusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth century, this lushly illustrated book positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives, their families, and the geographies through which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable objects. In considering both painting and decorative arts simultaneously, Art in a Season of Revolution departs from standard practice and resituates painters as artisans. Moreover, it gives equal play to the lives of the makers and the lives of the objects, to studying both within the interdependent social and economic webs linking local and distant populations of workers, theorists, suppliers, and patrons throughout the mercantile Atlantic.