The Handloom School, Women Weave

The Handloom School, is a unique, forward-looking, experimental project of WomenWeave Charitable Trust which offers a six-month fully-residential entrepreneurship development course for young weavers from different handloom clusters of India. It is aimed at creating ambassadors of Indian handloom who can carry the age-old craft forward.

Soolkaama conducted a collaborative workshop with the students. The workshop taught the participants principles of branding and marketing.

Apart from understanding core concepts for of developing a story, we went on to learn photo and video editing using a smartphone. Instead of relying on computers which can be expensive and difficult to maintain in remote rural towns, Soolkaama is interested in harnessing the power of the ubiquitous mobile phone. People are already comfortable using a smartphone. A mobile phone is largely considered to be a technically familiar device and there is little resistance to learning new software applications on them. We used a cheap video editing software to create short films that the students shot and edited on the phone itself. The films were about their brand and their life as weavers. Original content produced by adhering to some simple visual art principles has been proved to be engaging with audiences.