India Handloom Brand is drawing up new strategies that include retail and e-Commerce, in a bid to raise the market positioning of handloom.

There are four stores of the Central Cottage Industries Corporation of India at Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Chennai that stock India Handloom Brand Products. The organisation has more retail partnerships lined up for the year including APCO of Andhra Pradesh, the handloom stores of Telangana, Jammu & Kashmir, and fashion retailer BIBA.

The Union ministry of textiles, which promotes the India Handloom Brand, is not limiting itself to increasing retail footprint. One of its priorities is visibility for the brand on ecommerce sites. The office of development commissioner of handlooms has been engaging the likes of Flipkart, eBay, Amazon, Craftsvilla and Gaatha for marketing its products.

“The new strategy for revival of the handloom products not only includes branding for effective marketing but also include skill upgradation of weavers, loom upgradation, making good quality raw material available at cheaper rates, availability of adequate credit facilities, product design,” said Alok Kumar, Development Commissioner, Handloom.

India Handloom Brand that was launched by the prime minister in August 2015 is aimed at endorsing quality of handloom in terms of raw material, processing, embellishment, weaving, design and other parameters besides social and environment compliance.

The registration under the brand is given after stringent testing of samples at a government laboratory. The rejection rate at the labs has been close to 65 per cent to ensure premium quality standards. 170 such registrations have been granted to producing agencies and weavers in 41 categories. These India handloom producers after association with India Handloom Brand have clocked sales to the tune of Rs 15 crore in the last four months.

Source: The Economic Times