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Sisters' Creation:
Searching Buyers
For over eight years, this business run by four sisters has been making and selling handicraft articles made out of corn husks. Though they have not been able to make any significant profit out of it, they are pursuing the business with sheer enthusiasm and confidence that since it is a unique product, it will surely do good business sometime in the future when they find the right buyer.
They had registered the company in 2053 B.S. after a couple of years of experimenting and making an initial investment of some Rs. Rs 10,000 saved from their pocket money. The step was quite audacious. They had no prior training and had learnt about the business from a magazine. “We saw a scope to give a Nepali touch to the product and initially we started producing dolls in the form of village couple. Then we saw an opportunity to make items for Christmas,” says Laxmi Nakarmi, the proprietor of the firm, and second eldest of the four sisters.
How did they learn the work? “If you are influenced by something and you are imaginative and creative you can easily do it,” is her reply. However, the sisters have been attending various training in other fields of business such as saving on wastage.
When they started, they knew where they could get the raw material from but they were totally unaware about where to sell their products. But gradually they started getting orders. “People really appreciated the product made out of a thing that generally goes to waste,” says Nakarmi.
But the copycat culture hampered their business. A shop in Kopundole that used to buy the article from the sisters started making them on their own. “They are doing it even today though theirs is not of a good quality,” she says.
That forced them to search the market somewhere else. They participated in a number of exhibitions. The result was that they found shops in Thamel and also in Kopundole ready to buy their products. Though the exhibitions do not bring instant orders, they helped in getting future business by developing contacts, says Nakarmi.
Still the business volume has not increased much. She puts the annual sales at around Rs. 100,000 with most of the sales concentrated in the festival months such as Christmas. “Though it is not enough to cover our opportunity costs, we are continuing because we believe that it will surely find a market soon,” is her explanation. However, the eldest of the sisters is also working as a school teacher and Nakarmi herself takes up computer designing jobs to earn some money so that the business pursuit could be continued.
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Despite the small volume of business, the sisters are big on social service. They are meeting the educational expenses of one of their full-time employee and are now providing training to 10 women from the backward Deula community to whom they have started outsourcing the work. “But we are careful to ensure that the women do not run away after the training. We have designed the training in such a way that they must remain affiliated to us if they gain any benefit from the training,” she says.
In their effort to promote the market, the sisters also participated in an international exhibition in Dubai some years ago, but they suffered a terrible loss–about Rs. 500,000. Since the participation in such a big fair required a big volume of business they had taken different handicraft items from other producers paying a huge amount of money (we needed to see what would actually sell, says Nakarmi). All the articles were lost in a fire that gutted the exhibition site. “We could not get even the insurance compensation,” she complains.
What next?
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Laxmi Nakarmi |
Nakarmi says that they will continue participating in exhibitions here and abroad. The nearest in the future is an exhibition being held in New Delhi. Another plan is to open a sales outlet in a market centre. But this plan is now on hold because there is no good prospect for sales at present as tourists, the major buyers of such items, are not arriving in sufficient numbers.
Whatever may be the prospects for the immediate future, the sisters are determined not to leave this business. “We have already invested so much in it that we cannot leave it, “ asserts Nakarmi.
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