Our Procurement We procure nearly 50 different items from various different places across India. In all cases we procure directly from craftsmen, getting rid of all the middlemen. During procurement, we only look at the quality of the product and almost never at the names behind. We found in the course of our dealing with craftsmen that many of those who had made name for themselves had begun to sell works of less known craftsmen, as their own. You would therefore notice that we do not always give credit to individual craftsmen. Sometimes, when we do give, we have made ourselves absolutely sure that he or she is the actual creator of the work. Initially, when we had just started our business, our procurement quantities were small. However as our retail sales grew and we also begun to sell wholesale to stores worldwide, we began to procure in much larger quantities. We figured out that it would be impossible to procure all the needed quantities from a few individuals. We began to spend more time in the villages producing crafts, looking for more craftsmen. We found to our pleasant surprise that there were not just a few talented craftsmen in any village, there were infact many. These talented craftsmen had only not succeeded in marketing themselves. We then shifted from our policy of promoting individual craftsmen to promoting community of craftsmen. We felt that best form of promoting the community was to buy more from them and pay them on time. We are happy that our strategy has been working. Our sales from retail and wholesale have been going up, and so has our buying from these village crafts communities. We have great sense of satisfaction because we have been able to contribute in small way to bringing cheers and happiness to a community that is culturally so rich, yet economically so poor.