Buying at the Weaver’s Price

A Banarasi saree passes through, on average, four hands between the loom and a shop window, and the weaver receives somewhere between a seventh and a fifth of what the customer eventually pays. This is not a scandal so much as a structure: each intermediary is genuinely carrying risk and inventory, and none of them is individually unreasonable. The cumulative effect is nevertheless that the person who did the work is the person paid least for it.

We buy directly, and we accept the weaver’s number rather than negotiating it. In practice this means our saree costs roughly forty per cent more at the point of purchase than the same cloth would through the usual chain. We do not make that back on margin. We make it back on the fact that the weaving families we work with now give us first refusal on their best bolts, which over ten years has mattered far more than the forty per cent.

The uncomfortable part is that this model does not scale in any direction we would like. There are, on our count, fewer than nine hundred pit looms in Varanasi still producing at the standard we buy at, and the number falls every year — not because of demand but because the children of weavers are, entirely reasonably, becoming engineers. Buying at a fair price slows that decline. It does not reverse it, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

What appears to work better is anything that makes the craft legible to the person buying it. When we started printing the weaver’s name on the label, orders for handloom sarees rose by about a fifth in a year, and we had changed nothing about the cloth. People will pay for handwork when they can see that it is handwork. Most of the industry’s effort goes into hiding the difference; almost none goes into showing it.