Importers
Placing repeat orders against a planned calendar.
The price is agreed before the work starts.
We buy from the weavers and dye workshops that make the cloth and sell to the international buyer with no intermediate trader layer. You know which community produced a piece; the weaver is paid against an agreed order rather than a market price set after the work is finished.
- Parties in the chain
- 2
- Things agreed before weaving
- 7
- Named risks, managed
- 3
Direct trade is not only an ethical position
A buyer who can name the origin of a lot can answer provenance questions from customers, repeat an order from the same hands, and plan production capacity instead of hoping the right stock appears at market. It also removes the price opacity that makes handwoven textile sourcing difficult to budget.
- In a conventional chain, cloth passes through collectors and traders before reaching an exporter. Each handover adds margin while erasing information about who made the piece and when.
- Direct sourcing compresses that chain to two parties, which changes what can actually be promised.
What direct trade changes in practice
Five questions
Who wove this piece?
Conventional chain
Usually unknown by the time it ships
Direct trade
Recorded at the point of order
Can I reorder the same quality?
Conventional chain
Depends on what the market yields
Direct trade
Same workshop, same specification
When will it be ready?
Conventional chain
Estimated after purchase
Direct trade
Booked as a production slot before work starts
What was the weaver paid?
Conventional chain
Opaque
Direct trade
Agreed before weaving begins
Can quality be corrected?
Conventional chain
Only by rejecting stock
Direct trade
Adjusted during production
What is agreed before weaving begins
Everything that would otherwise become a dispute is written down at the start, because a handwoven order cannot be corrected retroactively once the warp is dressed and dyed.
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01
Piece list
Format, quantity, panel width and finished length per piece.
-
02
Yarn
Handspun or machine-spun cotton, stated explicitly.
-
03
Dye method
Natural indigo and morinda root, synthetic, or a combination.
-
04
Motif direction
Which motif families are used and how they are laid out.
-
05
Tolerance
The acceptable colour and dimension range against a retained reference piece.
-
06
Schedule
Production start, milestone photographs, inspection date, dispatch window.
-
07
Terms
Deposit, balance, delivery terms, and who arranges freight.
Fair payment, described rather than decorated
The verifiable commitment is structural: the price for a commissioned piece is agreed with the maker before work starts and is not renegotiated downward after the cloth exists. That protects the weaver from the classic risk of the craft, where months of labour meet a buyer’s market on delivery day.
We do not publish certification badges or third-party audit claims, because we would rather describe the mechanism than decorate it. Buyers who need documented social compliance for their own reporting should tell us what evidence their framework requires, and we will say plainly what we can and cannot supply for a given order.
How production capacity is actually planned
A large hinggi can occupy a weaver for months, and the dyeing that precedes weaving is measured in weeks of repeated dipping and drying. Capacity in Sumba is measured in loom-months rather than units per day, and that single fact governs every serious sourcing conversation.
-
01
Start from your calendar
Not from a stock list. Tell us in advance what you will need for a season.
-
02
A slot is reserved
A buyer who plans ahead gets a production slot. A buyer who orders when they run out competes for whatever capacity happens to be free.
-
03
Recurring accounts hold allocation
Effectively a standing reservation — the core benefit of the direct model.
-
04
Progress photographs
At agreed milestones, so problems surface while the loom is still running rather than after dispatch.
The three recurring risks are colour drift between lots, dimensional variation across pieces woven by different hands, and schedule slippage when weather interrupts the outdoor drying that natural dyeing depends on. All three are manageable if named before the order — and all three cause disputes when discovered after it. Where a piece falls outside the agreed tolerance it is replaced or re-priced by agreement, not shipped and argued about later.
Which buyers the direct model suits
The model’s advantages compound with continuity: the same workshop, the same reference piece, and a shortening feedback loop on quality.
It suits one-off opportunistic buyers less well, simply because the setup effort is disproportionate to a single small purchase — those buyers are usually better served from existing stock. There is no obligation to start large: stock order, then a small commissioned run, then a booked seasonal allocation is a sensible progression.
Frequently asked questions
Four questions
Next step
Tell us what you sell and what your customers ask for.
What you sell, the volume you expect over the next twelve months, and the provenance evidence your customers ask for — and we will explain exactly what we can commit to. We would rather turn down an order we cannot fulfil well than accept one and disappoint you at delivery.