Fair Trade Exhibition in Dharamsala from March 14-16th, 2011

Purpose of Exhibition: The purpose was to create awareness about fair trade and understand the domestic market and customer’s attitude towards handicrafts made by IM producer groups.


Participants:

1) IMEX, Rajpur
2) Clean Upper Dharamsala Paper Project
3) Lungta Products, Gu-Chu-Sum, Dharamsala
4) Tibetan Women Centre, Rajpur
5) Dekyiling Tibetan Handicraft Centre, Dekyiling
6) Tara Tibet beads, Dharamsala

Venue: Parking Lot of CUDP near the Main Temple

Products:

Tibetan Traditional Dress Chupa, Shirt, Dress, bags, Jewellery Bags, T-Shirts, All Recycle paper products, Carpets, File Folder, Wall Hanging, bags, purse, Incense, Beads.

Brief Report of the Exhibition:

Every year during the Tibetan New Year, His Holiness conducts teachings where several thousand people from all over the world visit Dharamsala to receive it. The Exhibition was actually planned for six days but the producer organizations thought it best to have it for only 3 days because the teaching was held only for a day and half.

It was enthralling to see people coming to the exhibitions and asking for interviews. Foreigners taking pictures is a common sight in Dharamsala which might help us in spreading awareness about fair trade and creating a niche in the domestic market.

There were people especially foreigners who frequent Dharamsala but do not have any information about these producer organizations. So, this exhibition proved helpful for the producer organizations to speak about their organizations and their production unit.

Since this being the first exhibition ever organized by SOIR-IM under the fair trade project, we learned that it would have helped customers to understand more about each organization’s craft through picture display. Some customer were keen to know how the products were made and feel quite amused after learning that these are done by the artisans especially the beads and Tibetan Apron.

The Total Turnover of all the Organizations for 3 days reached approx. 150,000 INR which was quite encouraging for a beginner.


Tsering Youdon
Fair Trade Coordinator
SOIR-IM