Celebrate Batik Day with Sandang Indonesia
If you happen to be in Jakarta today, you would likely see a lot of people wearing traditional batik. While most Indonesians are celebrating batik day in this way, a group of students from the startup Sandang Indonesia (or "Indonesia's Cloth") is celebrating the day by doing something more: launching an online e-commerce site for traditional Indonesia clothes.
Gagarin Adhitama, one of Sandang Indonesia's co-founders, explained that the Sandang Indonesia team consists of 11 students from the Bandung Institute of Technology. Sandang Indonesia wants to be a website that promotes Indonesia's culture, especially clothing. In addition to the e-commerce site, Sandang Indonesia has created a blog that discusses Indonesia's traditional outfits.
Currently, Sandang Indonesia is partnering with eight SMEs from across Indonesia. These SMEs sell all kinds of traditional Indonesian clothing such as batik caps, batik lukis, batik tulis, tenun ikat, tenun lurik, and songket via the website. Gagarin says:
[We think] Indonesians' enthusiasm to wear Indonesia's indigenous clothing is still relatively low. Meanwhile, there are a lot SMEs who produce this traditional clothing. We are trying to bridge these SMEs [to the online market] so they're not wasted. In the future, we’ll also try to document all of Indonesia's traditional clothings so that people both in Indonesia and abroad will know that these things are part of our national heritage.
Personally I think that interest in traditional outfits is still quite high. In fact, today, #batikday is trending on Twitter in Indonesia as it is the officially designated day to celebrate the craft. And this should be good signal for the folks at Sandang Indonesia.
The startup began with funding from a grant that they won from a Higher Education Directorate's program in university. Sandang Indonesia founders are now trying to monetize the startup by taking a percentage from each sale on its e-commerce site.
So if you’re celebrating Batik Day today, why not pay Sandang Indonesia a visit?
