

The Long Path to Artisan Independence - zakelfassi
http://helloanou.wordpress.com/2014/04/20/the-long-path-to-artisan-independence/

======
jtheory
From the site: "Anou means a well of water in Tashelheet, the language spoken
in the Ait Bouguemez valley of Morocco."

It's also a play on words w/ French (widely-spoken in Morocco) -- "À nous"
(pronounced the same) means "to us".

------
btown
I'm proud to be working on an early-stage startup that hopes to expand on this
model and its successes, incorporating artisan materials and stories into
affordable-luxury fashion products while opening dialogues between artisans
and end-users (they're more than just consumers!).

This article raises some interesting points. Seemingly unlikely occurrences
like accidents or geopolitical/remote events disrupting the only internet
access point for an artisan collective become important risk factors for a
startup to account for in their timelines, especially when they rely on
artisan partners for dependencies early on in the Gantt chart for a product
cycle! As if we didn't have enough uncertainty just by virtue of being a
startup... :) Good planning, redundant communications channels, and
relationships with multiple people on the ground at various distances (and
therefore in multiple internet connectivity zones!) can mitigate this... to a
point.

Something that startups like us do need to think about is resistance within
artisans' communities. As the article mentions, "men’s resistance was rooted
in the fact that their control as resellers of the rugs would decline as the
women learned how to do it on their own." Only regular on-the-ground presence
can have a chance of detecting these scenarios and mediating them, and that's
tough for a startup to prioritize - but it often has to be done.

Finally, when the authors cite youth who avoid training for artisan skills
because they fear that "in the best-case scenario, you live a life as an
organization’s beneficiary," this scenario is something that even the
article's success story needs to mitigate. While the successful Imelghaus
cooperative is in many ways independent, it's still the case that Imelghaus'
revenue stream largely depends on the continued appeal of a foreign-operated
brand, as well that brand's continued commitment to Imelghaus even as they
onboard other artisan collectives. This is especially true for artisan
products being incorporated into the fashion industry, where seasonality and
freshness of products is considered highly desirable (to say the least). Our
team's hypothesis is that at scale with multiple product lines incorporating
different artisans' products, we can continue to drive sales to artisan groups
that were highlighted in previous seasons, by promoting them in the same way
any data-driven company would promote related products to new and existing
customers; to put it mathematically, we'd add regressors for the success of
our artisan partners into the optimization algorithm for recommendations,
rather than recommending simply by user preferences alone, and leverage the
strength of our brand to make this strategy viable. We're still at the product
development stage, so only time will tell if this bears out. But it's an
intriguing and fulfilling space to dive into!

(If you're interested in discussing more, feel free to contact me in my
profile!)

