A Women on Wings and SwitchOn Foundation consulting collaboration
Imagine a group of women weavers, masters of the handloom, facing rising raw material costs due to climate change and physical strain from their craft. Yet, when offered an easier, more profitable path, the powerloom, they refused.
Why? They shared that the handloom is their culture, their heritage, their identity.
This commitment to cultural heritage in the face of modern challenges, drives our recent business consultancy assignment with the SwitchOn Foundation in Kolkata. Women on Wings proudly partners with SwitchOn, whose mission fosters a sustainable and equitable India by focusing on clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and climate-resilient livelihoods.
Who is the customer? What quality do they expect?
The challenge: climate change and cultural preservation
The eight women leaders we supported in marketing and design represent an estimated 400 women weavers of beautiful sarees and other creations from the Bankura and Nadia districts in West Bengal.
One critical challenge they face is climate change. Extreme weather reduces the quality and yield of domestic cotton and silk, which drives up sourcing costs for their essential raw materials. Beyond climate change, SwitchON also addresses other critical challenges for rural communities, including high input costs, dependence on middlemen, and a lack of proper business training needed to navigate a complex market.
“They are true entrepreneurs. They are determined to continue their weaving businesses despite headwinds,” says Women on Wings Senior Business Consultant Chanakya Mehta. “So they needed a strategy to turn their beautiful craft into a confident, profitable, and resilient business,”
A weaver putting together customer personas for different target groups
Our approach: consultancy and co-creation
Our intervention was designed to co-create sustainable, climate-resilient livelihoods that honor the women’s legacy and values. The initial online preparation with SwitchON and Marie-Gon included conducting a customer-needs survey and competitor analysis. We also defined the group’s core values, which include sustainability, equity and inclusion, empowerment, and community-centered growth.
In addition, through design training, we support these women in preserving local cultural traditions while strengthening their livelihoods.
Putting color theory into practice for product design
Defining brand and business with Marie-Gon
We brought in Women on Wings expert in design and marketing, Marie-Gon. She worked with SwitchOn in advance and lead a hands-on, intensive assignment in Kolkata. The goals included:
- Defining the end customer: Moving beyond generic sales to targeting specific customer personas, including understanding the varying needs, quality expectations, and color and design preferences of urban versus rural markets.
- Product and brand strategy: Creating a strong brand identity to ensure efforts are focused and strategic. The team delved into a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) and performed competitive research.
- Market readiness tools: Delivering a mini-masterclass on color theory and design, which led to the co-creation of plans for a business asset: a product catalog for their silk and cotton sarees. They also strategized on social media promotions and video creation.
We focused on empowering the women with the skills to confidently own their business decisions. By gaining these professional skills, they can now negotiate directly with buyers, set prices, calculate profit and loss, and confidently represent the other weavers in the market.
Marie=Gon finetuning color ideas with the weavers’ represenatitives
Progress and next steps for digital promotion
The weavers’ further understanding of the customer persona and their creation of designs tailored to those needs is the most critical area achieved since the workshop. The immediate next steps focus on transforming the workshop’s output into tangible sales tools:
- Together, we created a draft catalog during the workshop. The SwitchON Foundation team is now conducting the photoshoot to finalize a professional digital catalog for both silk and cotton sarees.
- Further discussions with Marie-Gon will refine the catalog design and ensure it perfectly reflects the customer persona and fabric/design preferences identified.
By collaborating with a strong partner like SwitchON Foundation, who operates across more than 10 Indian states and aims to impact 1 million lives by 2030, Women on Wings pro bono business consultancy creates the potential for wide-reaching impact. To date, Women on Wings has co-created over 450,000 jobs to transform countless lives and unleash the full potential of all women in rural India.
Women weavers in West Bengal associated with SwitchOn Foundation.
