Establishing a business in a remote Thai village has been a unique challenge for us. I would like to share some experiences with you that hopefully will be of interest to you and maybe you can learn from our experiences

A Little Bit of Background

Our village of Ban Dong Yang has less than 400 people and we are located about 13 miles from the nearest town of Si Sa Ket about 30 miles from the Cambodian border.

We are connected to the power grid but the infrastructure is very poor – often the poles carrying the power are little more than spindly bamboo poles. We do not have a mains water supply but fortunately we have a very reliable artesian water supply about 35 meters below the surface of our village and that supplies our non-drinking water requirements.

Internet connections are very rare and I doubt if any adults in our village have even heard the word “Google.” The system is very slow and at times non-existent for hours on end.  To get technical help and maintenance is a major problem and we may wait days for the service guys to get to us.

All the families here in our village are related back to my great-grandmother who founded our village more than 140 years ago.  Rice farming is the most common source of income but people never seem to be able to earn more than what they already owe to banks and money lenders.

Silk weaving is a cherished skill handed down through the generations but this skill was usually a pastime or a way to relax by the elderly ladies of our village. There was little or no interest shown by the younger generation in these craft skills.

It was only when we started to sell their creations at the local markets did we realize that our fabrics were the most sought after in the entire region. This gave me the idea of how to help my village and also re-ignited the enthusiasm in silk weaving by all members of our village.

Thai Silk Magic is a community business specializing in high quality, handmade Thai silk and all the profits are shared to improve lifestyles and education opportunities for the children of our village.

Getting Started

After messing around with government departments for months we finally were granted our export license for our silk products. At the same time we constructed our own weaving facility using our family’s funds.

In fact all the capital to set up and run our business has come from my family as no one else in the village has any money and we did not want to rely on government funds that may or may not have been available. And we didn't want any "hidden strings attached" to our village community enterprise.

It’s Always Comes Down to Money!

Corruption is alive and well here in Thailand and we wanted to keep control over the business revenue to ensure it remained in our village and not be “spirited away” to some official or advisor who was claiming to be able to organize our business for us.  This was, and still is, an issue that greatly upsets me.

Relying on our own limited funds has meant at many times our family was very short of money. Every month the majority of our funds being invested in Thai Silk Magic to build the weaving facility, purchase silk looms, buy in high quality raw silk with its ever increasing prices and pay our weavers for work done before we even had the chance to market and sell it via our website. But we never once thought of giving up on our passion to help our village.

Paying our weavers quickly was very important as it showed them that this business was real and the chance to earn a reasonable income each month was no longer just a dream. One of our earliest challenges was to win the trust of our village to participate in a business that sold their products online – something they could not relate to at all.

In fact the average income of our weaver families has more than doubled since we started just a little over 2 short years ago. But we have a long, long way to go still.

Creating an Online Presence

Despite the ever present risk of failing internet connections, my husband Peter enrolled in 3 online training programs to learn how to establish a website and more importantly how to maximize our visibility in the internet search engines like Google. He spend many, many weeks researching and getting our internet presence established and then many more months improving our “keyword” usage so we could rate on the first page of Google for our 5 main search keywords.

We had to promote ourselves in this way as our funds did not stretch to any form of advertising. We did have some success with press releases, writing articles for online directories containing links back to our site and commenting on forums and blogs in our niche. But nothing really substantial.

Whilst these methods did create almost 3,000 visitors a month to our website, we could not convert very many of them. In fact, our Google Analytics statistics showed us that our website visitors were spending less than a minute on our site and rarely looking at more than 1 or 2 pages.  They definitely weren’t potential buyers or business partners!

We also started creating lots of videos showing Thai Silk Magic in action plus glimpses behind the scenes of lifestyles in our village. These videos now totalling over 40 plus every new one we create, are uploaded to online directories like our YouTube Channel and all contain links back to our website.

Our Social Media Birth

However, it wasn’t until we had the fortune and pleasure to meet up with an fantastic English guy called Justin Wheeler that we really started to take off business wise.  Justin, who lives in Peru, operates many successful web busnesses including Vashon Media Company. Justin gave so much of his time and expertise in completely revamping our website (no disrespect to Peter!) and more importantly introducing us to the critically important concept of “Business Social Media.”

Our website needed to be “more social” to enable people to share us on social media.  We have made lots of improvements but we still have more to do – and to make it "stay alive" I guess we always will.

We also established our Twitter and Facebook accounts and Justin created our Facebook Fan page at the same time. We quickly realized the wisdom of Justin’s recommendations by being able to both establish and build relationships with potential customers (B2C) and business partners (B2B). We followed these accounts with a presence on FourSquare and StumbleUpon but it wasn’t until Justin educated us about Linkedin did our social media presence start to become a profitable reality.

Linkedin with its 100+ million professional members gave me the chance to be able to participate in group discussions, answer questions and help people who like ourselves had been struggling to get established. All this and it’s free.

Recently I also started to participate in groups on Facebook doing basically the same thing. However, I learnt very quickly that you have to be patient as relationships take time to develop and you never know what opportunities they may lead to. An added bonus is that you meet some wonderful people who are always willing to help and give advice. So just be positive and passionate in adding whatever value you can and let people get to know and trust you. I believe in this way people will seek you out and if this is correct then it's a lot more powerful than any paid advertising campaign. Sure it takes a lot of time but it's also enjoyable and exciting to be able to meet new people.

Currently I have nearly 400 professional connections on Linkedin and the vast majority of our nearly 1000 “likes” we currently have on our Facebook fan page have come from relationships started on Linkedin. We have over 3,000 followers on Twitter but we have not really maximized our potential with this site although we have started some really exciting relationships with excellent B2B potential down the line.

Words of Advice

From my limited experience so far I would strongly suggest you provide help, offer advice and share ideas rather than "sell" on social media. PASSIONATELY BELIEVE in your business mission and share this passion at every opportunity. Let people decide to come to you - then you really do have the chance to convert them with your passion and your products.

Spend time to really find your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). This was another big challenge for us especially as we were a small business new comer into the Thai silk industry that was dominated by large, long established companies. The time we spent in creating our unique points of differentiation from our competitors was time very well allocated. Do this and then you can build your brand around your USP with passion, self-belief and real enthusiasm. Think of our motto "Woven by Hand, with Love, for YOU" - can you feel the passion?

What have been the results of using a business social media strategy and being careful to always add value in any way we could and avoiding any sales pitches on each of these social media platforms?

Quite simply the visitors that are now coming to our website are a lot more aware of WHO we are and WHY we are doing what we do BEFORE they land there and our conversion rates have improved dramatically.

We still have lots of marketing challenges like how to engage more people on our Facebook fan page, how to get more readers to our blog and have more of them leave comments, how to deal more effectively with our retail and wholesale market niches and how to more efficiently run our social media marketing. For the latter we have been using Tweetdeck with good results but our twitter expertise needs a lot of improvement.

Recommended Resources

Please see the following links to resources we have found to be extremely helpful in building and implementing our marketing strategies. There are no affiliate arrangements in these endorsements - I just wanted to share what we found to be of value (most are free)

Wowwe – free video email service

Wajam – Great minds search alike

Easy Fan Page Design – a MUST HAVE for any Facebook Fan page

Buzz Zing – an incredibly supportive introduction to social media group

Jeffrey Gitomer’s “Social Boom” – the best $20 you will invest this year

What About Your Experiences?

What were (are) your biggest challenges in getting established online? Care to share some of your biggest mistakes and/or wins? What success have you had in using social media to build your brand?  Have you worked out your USP? Would you like some help with this? Please leave your thoughts and comments below as I know our readers would love to hear what you have to say and share.

If you liked this post please use the “Social Sharing” buttons below and help us share the word – we would appreciate that very much.

A few months ago we received a disturbing email from, at that particular time, one of our potential dressmaking customers.

The email mentioned that “It would give me great joy to know that by purchasing fabrics from your village, I could actually contribute to the well being of your village. My main concern is that I have no way to be sure you are telling the truth. I know there is much corruption in the world and that many poor people are treated very badly, especially in the textile industry. This is a fact that makes me very sad.”

We replied in detail to this email and we have now decided that this was an important topic to share so for your interest this was our response.

“Your letter really shocked us but then we realized that there are unscrupulous people around. I guess because we are so isolated we have never considered those thoughts of yours such as exploiting textile workers with unfair trade practices.”

We then asked her to please look at 4 links that hopefully will put her mind at rest.

1. Our Blog – where you will actually see exactly what happens in our village. Our blog not only looks at why, what and how we do things at Thai Silk Magic but shows the visitors we have had including 2 highly regarded Austrian/German textile designers last month and their reactions to both our fabric quality and what we are trying to accomplish with our mission. The blog also gives you a glimpse of life in our village and a behind the scenes look at Thai Silk Magic

http://www.thaisilkmagic.com/blog

2. All About Us – where we talk about why we have such a passion to help our village and our children

http://www.thaisilkmagic.com/about-us

3. Our Mission – that gives more details about why we decided to set up our Thai Silk Magic community enterprise.

http://www.thaisilkmagic.com/Thai-Silk-Magic-Mission

4.  Our Videos - Where we have a YouTube channel with more than 40 videos devoted to our handmade silk processes, our village lifestyles and the impact Thai Silk Magic is having.

http://www.youtube.com/user/daoinisan

A Personal Note

We then added a personal note where we provided details that we have never shared publically before.

“As you have so kindly pointed out that people in our textile industry are often poorly treated and suffer from corruption practices etc...I want to share some specific details with you.

Our village of Ban Dong Yang has 326 people, nearly all are related either by marriage or bloodlines and we are constantly under pressure from government "officials" who want to get "involved" with our project."

Corruption

To be completely open we acknowledged that “Corruption is alive and well here in Thailand and the more visible we become the greater the interest from people claiming to be able to assist us if we just give them x% of turnover etc....this makes me VERY mad and sad. We are DETERMINED to keep the profits in our village where they belong and can do most good.”

 

Financials

To put things into some sort of financial perspective we added that “The average income of our village was approximately $80 per month prior to Thai Silk Magic but with our village business sharing ALL the profits, after just 18 months, we now have our weavers and their families averaging about $170 per month and we want to improve this with more sales.

We pay more than double the going rate per meter for hand-weaving our silk and we also pay the same amount again as a BONUS when their fabrics are sold. We only retain funds to help cover some of our expenses and share all the rest.”

We then pointed out that “Thai Silk Magic is a family funded business and we are so proud of what we can do with our limited budget. We built our weaving facility, supply all the looms, all the highest quality raw silk and together with 2 others I also do all the natural dyeing. It’s a real team effort with children often helping out in collecting the natural dye materials and our grandmas doing all the hand reeling.”

Our Working Environment

To give some idea of our working environment we added that “Being a small isolated village, all our weavers are also family and friends so it's a very close community. My great grandmother was actually the first person to make a home here. All decisions regarding new members of our team, patterns, dye colours, payment schedules etc are resolved by team discussions. Our weavers and their families are well looked after - but we have a long, long way to go.”

Emotional Outcomes

The result of this philosophy is that apart from people being able to improve their homes and lifestyles, “one of the best and most emotional indicators of how we are helping our village can now be seen with the huge smiles on the faces of children going off to school so proudly in their new school uniforms, enjoying better school facilities and they are even putting on shows for the village. This is priceless”

Concluding Comments

We ended our email response with the following:

“I have done a translation of your email and this morning shared it with our weavers - they were shocked just like me. But we also realized that this is an issue that may also concern other people like you. Kind regards and thanks for your interest and your wake-up call - our village appreciates it.”

Post Script

The person who initially raised these important issues is now a very important and valued customer of Thai Silk Magic. She has also been very supportive in sharing what we are doing with many others.

Your Turn Now

Are you a dressmaker/designer/coutourier? What experiences have you had with "Fair Trade"? What examples of corruption have you seen in the textile industry? Please leave us your feedback. We appreciate what you think and it will help us and the other readers to better understand this important topic. Thanks for your comments

If you enjoyed this post don't forget to use the "Social Sharing" buttons below and help us spread our message -we really appreciate you doing that.

We have had lots of requests to share a little of our silk making and natural dye techniques. So even though we want to keep our grandmothers' secrets I will give you some general ideas of what is involved to successfully create high quality handmade silk and how we use natural dyes.

It's important to understand that we only use the very highest quality raw silk and some of it comes from our own silk worms. Unfortunately, we do not have the time or capacity to farm all our raw silk requirments so we constantly need to purchase high quality silk - and this is a huge additional cost.

Already this year costs of raw silk in the quality we want, have sky-rocketed by more than 130%. The last purchase we made in June 2011, cost over $83/kilo and if you realise that 1 kilogram of raw silk will only create, for example, about 6 meters of 3 ply fabric, then you have some idea of the impact of these costs. But at Thai Silk Magic we have not increased our prices - well not yet anyway!

Our silk is mulberry silk and our region of Si Sa Ket in Thailand is the home of Thai silkworm industry. The farming of silk worms is called Sericulture and as an important part of Thai history and trade, the sericulture industry is fully supported by the Thai royal Family.

In fact, I was very proud recently to be invited to demonstrate some natural dye processes at a Silk Symposium held at the Queen Sirikit Sericulture Center in Si Sa Ket.

After extracting the threads from the silk cocoons the natural dyeing process begins. Some of the dye colour materials, like the "klarm" wild flowers we use for indigo, must be collected during the monsoon season, after heavy rains, just as the flowers are emerging and before the sun rises. The reason for these requirements is to ensure the flowers are fresh and still moist otherwise the dye colours will not bind properly with the silk threads.

In fact, the seasons as well as the weather and time of day, determine what is available to us at any time. As rainfall and temperatures vary from season to season and year to year, it is often impossible to match perfectly a previous seasons colour - but this just makes it all the more exclusive and special. Sometimes the men of our village help us to collect dye materials as well as mixing them and this can be a very long process (more on this later).

Materials used for our natural dyes apart from wild flowers are special types of mountain grasses (from near the Cambodian border about 30 kms away but these days that is a dangerous place to go with the current political tensions between Thailand and Cambodia); young tree saplings (like the "khea" tree we use for our gold colours or the Siamese Cassia or Jackfruit); tree barks and leaves, selected tree roots (from the Rosella and Siamese Wattle) and wild fruits (like Carambola, Rambutan and Pomegranates).

For colour-fastness we never use chemical mordants like most other silk suppliers. Instead we use a special combination of Lemon Grass, Carambola fruit, Tamarind bark, Eucalyptus bark and leaves and ants! Yes ants but the actual combinations and processes we use are a secret we want to keep and pass on to our next generation. The most important thing is that it really works and we have never had a problem with colour bleaching even after many, many washes.

The dye materials are usually boiled in pure rain water for various periods - up to 5 hours. Quite often this has to be repeated many times, depending on the materials being used and the colours being sought. The temperatures must be keep constant throughout the process. We use specially designed clay pots for our dyeing processes.

Once the dye colours are achieved we then place the silk threads into the mix for 30 minutes to an hour. Then the threads are removed, cleaned in pure cool rain water and hung up to dry in a shady location. Then they are placed back into the dye solution  - this can be as many as 6 or 7 times. When the colour required is achieved the dyed threads are then placed into our natural mordants solution for 30 minutes and then rinsed 2 or 3 more times in rain water to double check the dye colours have fully attached to the silk threads.

The next step is to untangle the dried, naturally dyed silk and this takes a lot of care and time. Even though our thai silk has a tensile strength greater than steel for the same size filament, we must take special care in untangling so as we do not damage the threads in any way. A team of 4 people may take a full day to do this task.

Then the silk is stretched out over about 100 meters to straighten the threads before rolling it up on large spindles ready for spinning. We use PVC piping in the shape of hurldes, to stretch out the silk. However, we cannot do this step of the process if there is any wind at all otherwise the threads will become tangled again. Usually this is done very early in the morning (after sunrise but before breakfast).

Our grandmothers do most of our hand spinning (thank goodness as it's a very time consuming job) and have the spun silk placed on small spindles ready for the hand weaving process.

The next step is to attach the selected threads (yarn) to the frame of the loom. These threads are called "warp" and run lengthwise under tension. Then the long process of attaching the weft threads to the loom - these are the threads that are woven through the warp threads to create the fabric. It will usually take our weavers 2 days to set up their loom ready for weaving but this can be longer, depending on the width, pattern and type of ply being used.

A master hand weaver will be able to create about 2 meters of silk fabric in a 10 hour day. We do not encourage our weavers to rush as we want to maintain high quality rather than high quantity. Of course, all these handmade processes take a lot more time and effort than the large factory produced silk.

However, we do not compete against mass-produced silk suppliers. Our customers love our unique creations. our logo says it all - "Woven By Hand, with love for YOU"  We pride ourselves on the quality and exclusive nature of our fabric patterns and colours that more than likely, we will never be able to replicate.

This is an overview of our handmade Thai silk process and you can easily see it is very time consuming and labour intensive. It is also a "labour of love" as we really do love what we do and are we very proud to be able to carry on the traditions passed down to us by generations of skilled artisans.

What Do You Think?

Have you ever tried using natural dyes? What were your experiences? Did you enjoy it? What natural materials did you use and with what types of fabric?

If there is anything more you would like to know about our natural dye processes then please ask us. Just leave a comment below and I just might let a secret or two out! We enjoy your feedback and so will our readers so please leave a comment and we will definitely talk back with you.

If you enjoyed this post don't forget to use the "Social Sharing" buttons below and help us to spread our message - we really appreciate you doing that. Thank you.

This week we had 2 highly regarded silk textile experts visit with Thai Silk Magic. Barbara Bodingbauer from Austria and Elisabeth Prantl who is also an Austrian but based in Germany.

Both ladies stayed in our home along with their very nice Thai lady driver khun Dee. Barbara and Elisabeth spent 2 days looking at all our hand weaving processes, pattern design developments and the natural dyes we use for colouring. They initially planned to spend only one day so we were very lucky. Maybe our red wine and hospitality prolonged their visit with us.

They thoroughly checked out all our products, purchased a selection of our fabrics and scarves and requested samples of all our fabrics.

Elisabeth then spent 4 hours with Dao and I looking at the potential European market. She is very enthusiastic to return and work with us to introduce Thai Silk Magic to the European market and especially Germany. Now that would be great but we have a lot of planning work to do first. When the discussions looked at “design shows” my eyes probably glazed over completely. My knowledge of fashion is about as good as my understanding of ancient Greek!

Elisabeth and Barbara really surprised us as they rated our silk as by far the highest quality handmade silk they had seen on their 3 week textile journey throughout Thailand. They were so impressed with the raw silk threads we used, the texture, thread count, natural-colour-synthesis and lots of other terms I really didn’t understand.

They questioned Dao so many times about the high level of technical expertise she and her team displayed – at times Dao was lost as well in all the technical jargon. Dao simply explained that all the processes had been handed down to her by her great grandmother and grandmother who pleaded with her not to have these skills lost forever. Dao has also created her own unique patterns (Dok Pee Gun) that apparently completely blew them away with its “intricate simplicity” (quote)

However, the high standards of weaving and silk quality are also our biggest challenge according to Elisabeth. She said that we have completely mastered the requirements for the “top end” or “elite” markets but this market is extremely discerning and requires patience and relationships to be built along with exposure to samples of our products before they would consider buying from our website.

They told us that we definitely need to consider the much larger market of small Thai silk gift items such as handkerchiefs, small purses, silk flowers etc. So now Dao is busy searching out good quality sewing people.

Elisabeth also wants us to put together a detailed report that shows the “distinct potential economic and social consequences” of the work of Thai Silk Magic in our village to help her prepare a presentation to some German business groups who may be interested in helping our entry into the European market. All sounds good but there is a long way to go.

We would like to have some Thai government support as well but this is a problem area. We certainly do not want to approach the government who have the funds available for such a venture (and right now politically it would be viewed very favourably) because then the village (and us) lose control of the Thai Silk Magic project and all profits would not be shared with our village.

Interesting and exciting times are ahead for Dao and her Thai Silk Magic project. We just want to make sure our key mission of improving our village lifestyles and children’s educational opportunities is never compromised. Quite a challenge but we will do it somehow!