Artisanal products check a lot of boxes. They're based on distinct local traditions. They provide livelihoods in their native places. They are often creative, having been iterated over centuries. But notwithstanding all this, they're not widely available, and are not top-of-mind for a lot of people when they buy gifts for themselves or for others. At LVBL Accelerator we've been asking ourselves what it will take to change that, and make this lorry go faster. It seems as though many artisanal collectives are caught in no-man's land. They cannot produce more unless they can be confident of selling more. But they cannot sell more because they have not built a sales engine for themselves. Any intervention to improve matters, therefore, has to simultaneously focus on more market development and also on production. But the 'market' for artisanal gifting is for all sorts of products, whereas every collective is focused on one kind. While they can look for more buyers for the one kind of product that they make, that in itself is not enough. What's needed is a multi-collective platform for sales. So, we asked ourselves, why not build this? We began speaking with a few collectives known to us - in Bidar, in Channapatna, in Kanchipuram, in Dharwad, and other places to see what they currently do, and how an accelerator like LVBL can help. It was quite an interesting journey of learning - not only about the arts and crafts of each place, but also about the challenges at different stages of making and selling them. We're now ready with the first step in building the platform we've been thinking of. LVBL has partnered with Fairkraft Creations and the collectives they work with to build a template that many others can use. During the next few months, we will bring on to this platform the other collectives we have spoken with as well. A lot of retail channels are also pointing us to collectives that they like a lot, and this gives us even more conversations to have. Gifting is an evident channel for artisanal products. But many of the products are also quite useful as everyday objects, and would be chosen by more customers if they were simply made available based on their functional value. It should be possible to build a range of offerings by which, one day if a customer walks into a home products store, many of the things on the shelves are artisanal in each section, instead of one corner alone being set aside for such products. Raj Subramaniam Aditya Jhingan Lingaraj Dinni Aswana Mathew-Srinivas Divya Chennagiri Nagendra Vinay Prashant Nikhil Nadiger Arvind Balasubramanian Vivek Vivek Chandra Elango Vinay Ramesh Dr. Rahul Walawalkar Sharaschandra Shankar Nag Vignesh Nandakumar