From the farmer who grows the cotton to the weavers who spin the yarn -- the hidden faces that make the life cycle of your jeans, sari and T-shirt are being introduced to consumers through tags that carry their biographies and websites that post their videos
From the farmer who grows the cotton to the weavers who spin the yarnu00a0-- the hidden faces that make the life cycle of your jeans, sari and T-shirt are being introduced to consumers through tags that carry their biographies and websites that post their videos. Leading this trend are exponents of organic cotton and fair trade, those committed to rescue dying handloom practices, and an American denim megabrand that's begun growing its own cotton in India. The target? Customers who care
Apurva Kothari, co-founder of the three month-old T-shirt company No Nasties, wears one of his own creations that offers a latitude measurement. You can see that he loves it from the way he runs his hand, unconsciously, over his sleeve while he talks. A moment later, he offers up the sleeve for closer examination -- "Touch it," he says, "see how soft it is."
Apurva Kothari (in Orange tee), co-founder of organic T-shirt company
No Nasties, is flanked by Christopher Smith, an intern at the company
(Yellow tee), and friend Sagar Patel. pic/Rane Ashish
If you didn't know better, you'd think this was advertising overkill.
But after a long discussion on organic cotton and farmer suicides, you know that the worst that 35 year-old
Kothari can be accused of is evangelism.
Kothari and his partner, 31 year-old Diti Kotecha, started an organic cotton tee company in April. They work with a team of 10 designers -- the brief the duo gave them is to stay away from preachy slogans, says Kothari -- and you can read about the designers on their company website (nonasties.in).
"The idea is to give each person involved in the making of our tees, due recognition," he says. To that end, the designers are paid royalty for every tee sold.
But there's more -- the business of the soft sleeves, and the reason that Kothari and Kotecha became entrepreneurs in the first place.
"A recent statistic says there's a farmer in India committing suicide every half an hour. One third of the weight of a tee is due to chemicals. Cotton that forms only two per cent of the agricultural produce in the world, uses 25 per cent of the world's chemical fertilisers," says Kothari.
There are a lot of things at stake here -- the ecology of farmlands, the financial condition of farmers who take loans to buy fertilisers, their subsequent debts when their crops fail (which is often, since the soil is weakened through years of chemical pesticide use, and erratic monsoon), and of course, the quality of cotton that the customer ultimately wears.
Then there are scores of unseen faces, who also form part of the supply chain -- cotton processing involves 22 steps -- like the jinners who separate the seeds from the cotton, the spinners who make the yarn, the tailors, the mill workers and the weavers.
The No Nasties website talks about all of them as well.
Kothari and Kotecha join a growing tribe of retailers, who not only work in close quarters with the farmers and weavers whose products they sell, but also make an effort to introduce their customers to the original makers of the clothes they buy. And customers, on their part, seem more than ready.
In 2007, an IMRB survey of 10,000 Indian middle class consumers found that 30 per cent would be willing to pay more for ecologically-friendly products. A 2010 survey by global public relations firm Edelman found that 77 per cent of Indian consumers put more trust in brands that are socially responsible.
Ethicus prides itself on being precisely that. A brand of three generation-old cotton jinning company Apachi Cotton, Ethicus was started by current owners Mani Chinnaswamy and Vijayalakshmi Nachiar, a husband-wife team settled in Pollachi, a handloom village 40 km from the textile hub of Coimbatore. They set up Ethicus in 2009 by partnering with organic farmers in Kabini, near Mysore. Their plan was to sell ethically grown and created fabric -- linen, clothes, saris, -- and pay close attention to the farming, weaving and industrial practices that went into making those products.
"The time was ripe for India to get its own organic brand, but the farmers and weavers had to grow with our company," says Nachiar.
Ethicus works with 185 farmers who produce organic cotton in 444 acres of land in Kabini. This cotton is then woven into saris, table cloths, napkins, runners, curtains, tunics, dresses and stoles by 42 weavers in a design studio located in Pollachi. Ethicus also works with individual designers to create different collections.
And they inform their customers about the farmers, weavers and designers whom they work with, not only through their website (https://www.ethicus.in/), but also through a tag that comes attached with every product.
"Only when a farmer dies does his name appear in the papers. We wanted to give an identity to the farmers and weavers we work with," says Chinnaswamy.
It's not a product, it's a process
Last year, the duo started The Cotton Trail, a tourism initiative for those interested to see how they produce their cotton and weave their fabric.
"We did this initially for our Italian export clients so they could see how organic cotton is grown in Kabani. They shared a meal with the farmers too. We then took them to Pollachi to meet the weavers who work at our studio. The decision to open up the initiative for everyone was made so that customers realise the effort that goes into making the fabric they wear," says Nachiar.
The IOU Project started by Kavita Parmar in May 2011 operates along the same line. The website of this online clothes retail store has videos and short descriptions of the Madras weavers from whom Madrid-based Parmar sources her fabric. These weaves are then stitched into unique jackets, scarves, shorts, and shirts by tailors based in Romania, Spain and Portugal.
For Parmar, this visualisation over the Internet generates more than consumer curiosity. Each product is traced back to the weaver who has spun the fabric.
A Suseela, a 60 year-old weaver from Kedar, Tamil Nadu, is one of the 223 weavers from whom Parmar sources her lungi fabric. "My husband taught me to weave. With the money I earn, we are able to pay for our three sons' education," says Suseela on the IOU website (iouproject.com). Her weaves are then used to make waist coats, shorter jumpsuits, jackets and tunics.
Parmar works with nine weavers' groups in three regions of Tamil Nadu -- Karaikadu, Kedar and Naduveerapatu -- all of whom belong to one of the country's largest handloom weavers' co-operative society called Co-optex.
At the same time, the IOU Project has also developed a unique strategy to increase customer awareness, by roping in bloggers and other social media platform users to spread the word. Abhinav Sanghi, a 27 year-old lawyer-turned-photo journalist from New Delhi is one such trunk show host (which is what these bloggers are called).
The trunk show host collection allows anyone with a Facebook page and a Pay Pal account to own a page on the IOU Project website, where they can showcase any 20 garments from IOU's collection. They share this page with their friends through social networking sites. If anyone buys a piece from their page in the first week, the trunk show host gets 20 per cent of the amount. This decreases to 15 per cent in the second week and 12.5 per cent in week three. After this, the piece is added back to the home page of the site, explains Sanghi.
"The most interesting bit about this is that I can choose to use the 20 per cent discount in a number of ways.
Either I encash it, or offer it to my friends as an incentive for them to buy a product. I can even pledge the money to the weavers through the site. It's an interesting way to create a history of the product that the customer is buying. It adds meaning to their purchase."
More than just an introduction
Besides raising concerns of farmers, No Nasties is a Fair Trade certified company, which means that the cotton from which their tees are made, is sourced by the mill (in this case, Rajlaxmi Mills in Kolkata) at a premium of 15 per cent. The farmers' groups that sell their cotton to this mill get 15 per cent more than the rate they have fixed per quintal. This premium is then utilised for developmental projects by farmers' cooperatives. The mill in turn will sell the tees to No Nasties at a similar premium.
Like No Nasties, a fashion line by designer Anita Dongre called Grass Root, and Future Group affiliated Mother Earth also sell Fair Trade-certified clothes. Online retail store Celebwear.in recently began selling Fair Trade-certified replicas of clothes worn by movie stars in various films.
Offering them this certification is an Andheri-based not for profit organisation, Shop For Change that was established in 2009. The NGO lays down standards for sustainable farming, acceptable working conditions for farmers, quality of produce and what needs to be followed at the retailers' end.
Shop for Change works with 5,300 organic cotton farmers spread over three farmers' cooperative groups in four states, Gujarat (Kutch region)u00a0 Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra (Vidarbha region), informs founder Seth Petchers. By the end of September, they would have tied up with three more apparel retailers to sell organic cotton products.
"Our aim is to give farmers a more direct marketing connect in urban centres through mainstream brands, while creating a consumer movement about sustainability," says Petchers.
"Through Fair Trade, we ensure a better bargaining stance for farmers so that they wouldn't have to undersell their produce. It offers them negotiation power and allows customers to know that they are making a difference for the farmers," adds Petchers.
One of the farmers' groups that Shop For Change works with is Chetna Organic, a farmers' co-operative that recently registered itself as a producer company, which, explains Chief Executive Officer Ashutosh Deshpande, is a hybrid between a private company and a co-operative.
What this means is that they can now sell products made by the farmers, who are part of the co-operative.
Pramod Dendawe is one of the farmers working with Chetna Organic since 2006. The 44 year-old Commerce graduate inherited a 24-acre farmland in Vidarbha's Akola region from his father eight years ago, and has been growing organic cotton on it ever since. In January, the farmer group he belongs to sold the extra cotton that grew after the harvesting season in November was over, to another neighbouring co-operative of weavers. They intend to make organic cotton shirts and sell them to villagers and townspeople, thereby creating a market of consumers at their end as well.
When asked how knowing his urban customer would help, Dendawe remains quiet for a while.
He then says, "Last year, three of my neighbours who grew genetically-modified cotton, killed themselves because early rains ruined their crop. They had borrowed money to buy fertilisers, and Genetically Modified (GM) seeds in the black market, because advertisements said the yield would be more. Two years ago, one farmer in my village committed suicide. If my customers know me, they'll make sure I don't die."
Dendawe also points out that the premium fetched by Fair Trade-certified organic cotton helps his community create development infrastructure like schools and community markets.
The importance of farmers taking a keen interest in ecological concerns and the quality of their crop isn't lost on American denim manufacturer Levi's that is part of the Better Cotton Initiative (BCI) -- a programme launched in 2005 along with other apparel makers like Marks and Spencer, and organisations such as World Wildlife Federation and Oxfam, to grow environment-friendly cotton. They began to grow cotton in India last year, and harvested their first yield earlier this year. At present, they are working with 70,000 farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka, Gujarat, Punjab, and Maharashtra.
While they do not stress on creating organic cotton, they are keen to create ecologically-sensitive farmers, says BCI Chairman and Vice-President, Supply Chain Social and Environmental Sustainability at Levi Strauss & Co Michael Kobori.
"Already, the first crop has emerged from India and we will weave that cotton into some of the denims starting this September," says Kobori.
The initiative is still in its three-year trial and implementation phase, but a BCI tag may be in the pipeline, after a review next year.
"We plan to inform customers about the initiative to raise awareness about where the cotton is coming from, through conferences. However, at the moment, the yield is limited. We will increase the percentage of 'Better Cotton' blend in regular fabrics over the years," adds Kobori.
Uma Prajapati, founder of Upasana, a design studio based in Auroville that works with farmer groups in Tamil Nadu as well as Varanasi weavers, is quick to point out that consumer awareness should not be achieved at the cost of "over-simplifying the process and ignoring the work done by all the communities involved."
"There are 22 steps in cotton processing," says Prajapati. "As consumers, we go for that which is fancy, without realising the effort that has gone into making the clothes. Urban consumers are illiterate and don't see how entire communities are dying," she says.
The effort, she adds, should always be to increase customer awareness, while also protecting farmers so that they aren't taken for a ride by the market.
With retailers like Kothari and co., it seems the market itself is on a journey of change.
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