MADURAI: The State Department of Handlooms and Textiles launched a brand new e-Commerce site for its Loom World concept on Wednesday. The site will enable individual Handloom Weavers’ cooperative societies to sell their products separately.
Launched by Tamil Nadu Minister of Handlooms and Textiles Gokula Indira, the site is the Department’s effort to get on the e-commerce bandwagon and market its Loom World concept. “Loom World as a concept has been around for a while but it is not as widespread as Cooptex, which is the marketing cooperation for all Cooperative Societies,” pointed out a senior department official.
Loom World on the other hand is a looser concept. “Loom World lets each individual cooperative society market and their own wares. The scale of Loom World though has always been small. It has only nine showrooms as opposed to Cooptex, its sister brand, which has more than 200,” said the official.
Taking Loom World to the digital world is the Department’s answer to scale up the concept. Co-optex, say department sources, can handle barely 30% of the market that the whole of Handloom cooperatives in Tamil Nadu need. “We hope that Loom World, now that it has gone live, will be able to reach a far wider audience than it has so far,” said the official.
To address an even wider reach, the department is also in talks with major e-commerce sites like Flipkart and SnapDeal.
Apart from the launch of the Loom World site, Wednesday also marked the beginning of the Special Handloom Expo 2016. The Expo will continue until January 13 at the Vijaya Mahal at Pondy Bazaar in T Nagar and will boast of stalls from over a 100 Handloom Cooperative Societies from across the State. Products on sale will include silk sarees, veshtis etc. The Expo is expected to net over `10 crore in revenue this year.
