Growth Strategy

Growth Strategy

The main hurdle in North-East India is not any political vendetta. The hurdle is its marketability. The goods produced by the weavers in the region must be sold in the market to earn revenues. This in turn can boost the trade and employment problems in the North-East region.

About 70% of the Handloom industry in North-East India is unorganised. Our startup idea is an e-commerce platform where sellers would be putting their products for sale. So, the first priority is attracting the sellers. There is a sleepy village in Assam, which is often known as the “Manchester of the East”. The name of the village is Sualkuchi, in which the entire population weaves with silk. We would suggest creating a scheme to train the local artisans in areas such as micro-finance, conducting workshops and seminars of what we are trying to do and the benefits of it. This is an initial strategy which is getting the best suppliers in an untapped market.

There are not many players in this sector plus there are hardly any players in the e-commerce sector. There is a chance to achieve a first-mover advantage in this sector. We can create a value proposition aimed at quality products from North-East.

• First, we would concentrate only on the handloom clothes which would be our Cash Cow. We would start by first employing the ‘Market Penetration” strategy of the Ansoff Matrix trying to increase the number of consumers and enhancing the market share of the products in the North-eastern region first. We are not sure at the moment about the probabilility of acceptance of these products outside this region. Forming an association of weavers in the region and building fund contributing everybody there, going and meeting big establishments like hospitals, hotels etc. of our nearby markets such as Guwahati, Shillong, Agartala etc. would be a safe option to create awareness and identify the niche.
• Once the awareness has been created we will try to promote the product to other states with delivery options in the Tier 1 cities. For this we have to invest heavily in both offline and digital marketing. We have to be present in Social media to increase the brand awareness. This is the stage where we would like to go for an intensive growth which will involve expanding our product range from just clothes to various other handloom products. We are now present in the “Market Development” quadrant of the Ansoff matrix. We will be developing new distribution channels and introduce differentiated pricing. But the problem will still be the lack of experience outside the parent firm.
• Next, we enter the product development and diversification strategy of the matrix where we focus on innovating new and improvement of the existing products to adapt to the changing demands as we continue to enter new markets. Diversification is the most risky one of all the strategies. We will now be exploring foreign markets outside India and establishing new channels of distribution and delivery.

In the midst of all the growth planning we should be careful about the competition. We would looking at similar businesses (if any) that are growing in new, unique ways to inform our growth strategy. We would be focusing on our strengths instead of our weaknesses to reorient the playing field to suit our strengths.