In a push to locally-made artisanal products, Reliance Retail Ltd. said it had showcased more than 40,000 artisan-crafted products to its customers in the festive season.
A direct result of its three-year old flagship initiatives, “Indie by AJIO” and “Swadesh,” started to provide avenues for sales and employment to local craftsmen, the programmes now engage with more than 30,000 craftsmen, representing over 600 art forms across a wide spectrum of clothing, textiles, handicrafts and handmade natural goods, the company said.
“Our development efforts over the last few years are now bearing strong results both in our ability to engage with an increasing number of craftsmen as well as our ability to co-create and co-curate products that are being increasingly accepted by today’s consumers,” said Akhilesh Prasad, president, Reliance Fashion & Lifestyle.
“Reliance Retail’s success in bringing such a huge repertoire of traditional handcrafted products to its modern retail formats is also an indication of existence of demand for such products, as long as consumers’ expectations of quality, style and convenience of modern retail buying can be met,” the firm said.
Indie by AJIO is an online marketplace for local artisans and handcrafted products and promotes the textile and handloom traditions of India with curation and contemporary interpretation. The AJIO platform features this idiom in the wide lifestyle products ranging from apparel to home furnishing and accessories such as jewellery and footwear.
The crafts includes Ikat, Shibori, Banarasi, Bagh, Ajrakh to Jamdani, Tangail, Chanderi. The Indie range is sourced from 50 Geographical Indication (GI) clusters in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Odisha, Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal.
The GI tag identifies natural produce, handicrafts or manufactured goods as products native to a territory, region or locality for their unique characteristics by attributing them to their geographical origin.