Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in #edGY, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on December 21 - 27, 2015.


THE “social” in social enterprise is all-important to Amy Blair, CEO and founder of fair trade The Batik Boutique.

The Desa Sri Hartamas-based company employs women from urban poor communities to fabricate fashion and home accessories from local batik, empowering them towards self-sufficiency. Of The Batik Boutique’s profits, 80% goes to their beneficiaries.

“I make a decision on business based on how it will affect Nor, not Amy. How it will affect Ana and how it will affect Nurul and Siti,” the Texan tells #edGY, listing the names of the seamstresses who staff The Batik Boutique’s sewing centre. “I make my business decisions based on ‘Am I solving their issue?’”

The ambitious Blair has lofty goals for The Batik Boutique. “I believe we can be the premier premium gift provider for Malaysian corporations,” she declares. 

“I believe we can impact multiple communities. I believe we can empower hundreds of women to have a sustainable income and a lifestyle that they’re comfortable with, that they want, with their families. I believe we can make it at an international level.”

Eventually, Blair would like to expand the company beyond batik into manufacturing clothing and textiles for international brands and small labels.

The Batik Boutique is in the business of empowering people and making consumers more aware of their purchases, which, Blair says, is what designers and people are looking for. They want to know where their clothes were made and they’re willing to pay a bit more for something that they can feel comfortable about selling later to a consumer.

The building blocks of a social enterprise
Like many startups, The Batik Boutique grew out of identifying an opportunity, although Blair would be the first to point out that it didn’t quite begin as a business.

After having her first child, she met Kak Ana, a single mother whom she took language lessons from. Something clicked when Blair discovered that Kak Ana had a sewing machine. They planned a small project together and when Blair went back to the US for Christmas that year, she brought along hand-sewn gifts that Kak Ana had fashioned from batik.

“When I went to the US, people loved what we gave them and, in fact, they asked me if I had more and if they could purchase them. And, of course, I didn’t! Because I was just helping a friend,” she says. Kak Ana introduced her to other women in her community with similar stories of their own.

Blair set up her social enterprise to tap this opportunity while fulfilling a desire to help the women she met. The challenges were many. These women had children to take care of and could neither afford childcare nor transport.

“To have the business model and to meet the needs, we had to alleviate the childcare and transport issues first. And that’s what we did,” she says.

In many cases, Blair is picking up where non-profit efforts left off. Meeting the women she wants to help, she’s found that many have been trained and have their own sewing machines. Yet these machines languish in their homes, unused.

While these women are encouraged to be immediately entrepreneurial at the programmes they attend, Blair notes the utter lack of support and infrastructure standing in their way.

“They’ve not been taught how to use Instagram, the internet, a website ... half of them don’t have a smartphone. But I find that we’re lacking follow-through, we’re training, yes. But then what? We want to be the answer to the ‘then what?’,” she says.

Another problem was the lack of follow-up.

“In Malaysia, we develop lots of very good programmes, the government is very supportive of good programmes but then the follow-up is what’s lacking, the going back — I want to know after these programmes happened, who went back in six months to ask how’s that lady you helped with that oven or sewing machine, where is she now? You know, is she using it?”

Sustainability and scale
The Batik Boutique works with 15 to 20 seamstresses as well as 50 different artisans from 10 village-run batik suppliers in Kelantan, Terengganu and Kuala Lumpur.

Managing sustainability is a multi-faceted problem requiring diverse solutions. There’s helping batik artisans advance their art through innovations in materials and design; there’s balancing marketing and production; and there’s coaching the seamstresses.

At their sewing centre in a PPR (People’s Housing Project) flat complex, The Batik Boutique offers training to mainly women whose monthly household income is below RM1,300. Many of these women are primary earners in their family and on average, they have five dependants.

Before any sewing takes place, the trainees are put through something far more important — a financial literacy programme designed to help them manage their money and budget. Blair coaches them on terms they need to know to guard themselves financially. “That’s what we call successful and sustainable,” she says.

If there’s anything that is essential for sustainability, it’s scale. Blair says The Batik Boutique achieves this by focusing on high-volume wholesale orders, including manufacturing for fashion labels as well as corporate gifts. Wholesale orders make up 80% of The Batik Boutique’s revenue while the rest comes from retail.

Its biggest breakthrough so far has been inking a deal with US fair trade label Raven + Lily, for which it produces silk lounge wear, scarves and outerwear.

The Batik Boutique sells its products through its website, its Desa Sri Hartamas studio and gift shop Allison’s Place, at the Petronas Twin Towers’ gift shop, the National Textile Museum and social enterprise pop-up store The Good Shop. Prices range from US$12 (RM51.60) for a key fob to US$54 (RM232.70) for a swimsuit cover.

Over the past year, The Batik Boutique has trained 15 new seamstresses to boost production capacity and Blair expects to at least double capacity and outreach next year. Her prime concern, however, is sustaining growth.

In 2015, she assembled a team, refined their products, streamlined their profiling and training, as well as learnt the dynamics involved, so that next year, “we’re just going to put our foot on the gas and go”.

Among her plans for next year are batik workshops, expanding manufacturing for Raven + Lily and, crucially, doubling both their impact and output.

It’s a back-breaking amount of work “but isn’t that what batik is?” Blair asks. “It’s time-consuming and it’s labour-intensive, yet once you put all the pieces that are complicated together, it makes this beautiful thing.”

 

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