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Marketing muga
Thomas R. DeGregori
http://www.assamtribune.com/mar2207/at08.html
The Assam Tribune
Guwahati, Saturday April 7, 2007
[]
Because of my extensive
overseas work, our house is filled from front to back and top to bottom
with artifacts from around the world including India. I was under strict
instructions by my wife not to bring anything home this trip. As soon as I
went to Sualkuchi and saw the muga
silk, I knew that my wife would want me to ignore her instructions and I was
right. I have brought much silk to my wife from many places but none compares
with that which I brought from Assam. My wife was more than
delighted, she was ecstatic even before I returned as I recommended that she
go online and learn about it.
I googled muga silk, Assam silk, Sualkuchi silk, etc from my hotel in Guwahati
and again when I returned. I also tried Yahoo and several other search
engines and clicked-on some of them under shopping. Needless to say that
there is no shortage of highly informative sites on muga
silk and Sualkuchi with many having some really
fine colour illustrations. There are even sites on
Indian government efforts to promote the marketing of muga
silk and the development of Sualkuchi and the
surrounding region. Some even gave the prices that it sells for in Delhi and Japan (about three times what it
sells for in the village).
But none of the many sites that I explored gave even the slightest hint
as to how one could obtain it, let alone have a site where one could buy it.
Given the number of sites, there must already be a significant number of
people who already know about muga silk. For
others, it would not take much promotion to inform them since they could
easily go online and learn quite a bit about it. My guess it is only a
guess is that it is more an art form waiting to be discovered than already
discovered.
My proposal is that a Sualkuchi/Assam/Muga web
page be set up for the promotion and sale of muga
silk. It should be carefully designed including all of the key words on its
homepage so that it comes up on search engines searching for it. One might
even have discretely at the bottom of the page place a note about alternative
spellings so that someone searching using an incorrect spelling would find
it. The home page could carry a guarantee that every link to a local artist’s
page would be only for authentic muga silk. If the
village wished to also promote other forms of weaving or crafts, they could
have a link to a separate homepage.
From the Sualkuchi/Assam/Muga homepage,
one could click-on to the page of local artists. There would need to be some
form of village cooperative organization which among other things makes
available digital cameras and computers to upload pictures of their wares to
their webpage. I assume that there are plenty of digital cameras and
computers in the village but not every artist would have them. The artist
could post their work, its weight and its price. If someone chose to buy it,
they could click-on and be transferred to a secure site run by the village
organization. This secure site could indicate the various modes of payment
and based upon weight, the cost of various ways of shipping it.
As soon as the payment mode is authenticated, the credit card information
could be removed from the computer and stored in a computer that is not
online so that there would be no possibility of a hacker gaining access to
that data. The customer’s name address and purchase history could be kept on
the online computer. Upon completion of the transaction, the cloth is brought
to a centralized village location to be wrapped, shipped and insured with the
recipient being required to sign for it. The latter is important because
there are those who will receive a purchase and then complain to the credit
card company that they never received it and have the money credited back to
their account. The centralized service would collect and keep the shipping,
handling and insurance fee and then deduct a small percentage from what they
collect for the artist to cover the cost of their service. In any case, the
artist would get a far larger percentage of the final price that consumer’s
pay for their work than they are currently getting.
Some very small artists might not wish to have their own site. There
could be an online village store that would post and sell it for them with a
slightly higher percentage fee for their effort. It is important to have a
village store with a good inventory even if it means requiring some of the
larger sellers to offer some of their product through it. One would wish to
have a certain minimum product in village store so that some of it could be
sold through a village Sualkuchi muga silk ebay store. Of
course, everything sold through an ‘ebay store’
would go out with the artist card and the url for
the Sualkuchi muga silk
homepage. These cards should probably go out with all sales along with a
brochure on Sualkuchi and muga
silk.
The dealers and consumer outlets that they provide with muga silk should not be abandoned. As more products are
sold online, the dealers will find it increasingly difficult to find enough
silk to provide to their customers particularly since the online sales would
be at a significantly higher price than what they have been paying. They
should be offered the opportunity to come in and invest in the village to
improved technology and other means to expand output. Some of the stores
might prefer to continue to obtain their muga silk
through the dealers from whom they have traditionally obtained it.
The stores could go to a webpage of dealers with long established ties to
Sualkuchi and have a direct link to the Sualkuchi webpage and order what they wish to buy. The
click to buy would then link them back to the dealer’s page where they would
complete the transaction and then the dealer could pay the artist via the
village and either pick it up as they always have
done or have it shipped. Or the store could simply click through via the
dealer to the Sualkuchi webpage and click to
purchase the same as other customers would. The difference being that the
artist would provide a modest commission to the dealer for everything that is
bought via his webpage. There would still be the posting or pick-up option
depending on the dealer’s preference. Amazon.com and other sites give
commission to items purchased via another authorized website. It effectively
has others advertising your product and the more links to your page the
higher rating that you get in a Google search.
I have no doubt that Assam has an abundance of local talent that can come
up with many more ideas on creating a working webpage to market muga silk.
[The author is a professor at the University of Houston, USA]
Thomas DeGregori y, April 07, 2007
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