E is for Embroidery, F is for Felt

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan: Here I am in a land full of mountains and challenged for vowels, where I have come to give a workshop an how to work with US buyers, addressing issues such as pricing, marketing and communication. The workshop, this past Saturday, was sponsored by the Central Eurasian Leadership Academy (CELA) and brought together artisans from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. For those readers who are geographically challenged, this is an area West of China, North of India and Northeast of Afghanistan. Travel note: This is the first country I’ve visited that shoots USD out of the cash machines?!

Felt items, and anything one can embroider, from clothes to hats to change purses, is in abundance here and there is quite a bit of “competition” among the Central Asian countries for who is known for what crafts and who is merely copying others. Prices also vary widely with Kyrgyzstan coming out somewhere in the middle and the Uzbeks supposedly taking the prize for having the lowest costs.

Sunday was spent visiting both a fairly standard shopping mall (indoors and warm) that had washing machines and cell phones along with traditional crafts (read: felt hats and mini yurts), and a local market (outdoors and chilly) that sold everything from three inch thick carrots and eight varieties of apricots, to cheap Chinese clothing and Russian dolls (read; typical market bazaar). It gave me a good sense of what I’d be seeing over the next couple days of visiting artisan workshops.

Not surprisingly, things here are quite different from Africa—except for the fact that every country is landlocked and all have different shipping and export laws. When I made the comment that this was in fact one similarity to Africa I was quickly told not to compare Central Asia to Africa as it had nowhere near the poverty, war, disease, etc. I guess it would be unfair to label Central Asia as a “developing” market so I’m going with the term “emerging” and staying a long way away from “third world,” for reasons that go way beyond the PC factor!

The most interesting thing I’ve learned thus far is that the people are very proud and do not like discuss their troubles. This issue arose when I asked about the ‘stories” behind the products or workshops, i.e., do they support women in some way or help the sick or needy or anything along these lines. Their response was “is this important?” Even getting them to elaborate on the history of a product or the design tradition is proving difficult. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that marketing is the norm for former Soviet Republics. Fortunately, the woman who runs the Central Asia Crafts Support Association (CACSA) understands the importance of having some stories associated with the products, though she is having a hard time convincing the artisans of this.