Are you looking for a fashion brand that looks good and does good? We meet Amy Cox Blair, the founder and CEO of Batik Boutique, a Malaysian social enterprise that empowers artisans and celebrates traditional Batik making.
Freda Liu and Rhianne Lovell-Boland chat with Amy about how Batik Boutique provides skills training, fair work conditions, and income opportunities to over 300 artisans and refugees. They’ll also discuss the beautiful batik apparel, homeware, and gifts Batik Boutique creates using sustainable materials. We’ll learn how Batik Boutique measures success beyond just profit, focusing on the impact on artisans and the environment. If you’re looking for a way to support ethical fashion and empower communities, you won’t want to miss this episode!
This is a transcript of the interview, edited for clarity.
Freda Liu (Host)
Hello, you’re watching The Shift with Freda Liu and my special co-host all the way from Singapore, Rhianne Lovell-Boland . Say hello. Hi everyone, thanks so much for having me.
And if you’ve been watching the show The Shift, it’s about the shift towards sustainability, whether it’s big changes or small changes, how are individuals and organizations doing this. So, we try to feature them here and we believe it is a collective effort of everyone. Our guest today, Rhianne will explain, but before that, proudly wearing her outfit.
Rhianne Lovell-Boland (Co-Host)
Yes, so Batik Boutique exists to do good as they do business. Their main area of impact is in the artisans’ communities. They provide skills training and income opportunities to makers across Malaysia.
And as a company, they are committed to the UN SDGs for no poverty, fair work conditions and gender equality. And in addition, they use a portion of all their revenue for impact projects such as capacity building training and refugee education.
Freda Liu
And of course, I’m here with Amy Cox Blair, my good friend as well, our founder and CEO. So, good to be speaking to you again and having this conversation right now. Your story started in 2009 with your helper and it’s now over 10 years later.
What have been some of the milestones?
Amy Cox Blair (Founder & CEO of Batik Boutique)
A lot happens in 10 years. Thanks for having me. I’m so excited to be here and to celebrate this with you.
Some of the milestones include moving the office from my house to our first office, [Laughter] from having seamstresses cut one by one in their homes to actually running a production center, from opening our first retail boutique to now having three, from deciding that we needed to pivot to e-commerce in COVID, to selling to over 40 countries, from working with a few artisans to over 300, from learning and understanding what is Malaysian Batik and trying to help and educate others, doing some really cool corporate collaborations with big brands.
And we just launched a contest this week with Disney and GSC Studios. So, that’s pretty exciting. I can’t believe like last year we worked with Ikea, Body Shop.
There are these brands that have kind of been on my dream list and some of those actually happened now. So, yeah, there’s a lot going on in 10 years.
Freda Liu
Since the conversation with the helper.
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah, a lot has happened since then.
Freda Liu
Okay.
Rhianne Lovell-Boland
So, can you tell us more, what exactly do you do and who are these artisans?
Amy Cox Blair
Sure. Batik Boutique is a social enterprise and we’re basically business for good. Social enterprise mixes business and charity into one. So, we’re just as focused as a business model would be, but we have another edge to us and that’s in making impact.
We collaborate with artisans all across Malaysia and there’s over several hundred of them that we create our own designs from batik, from this hand-printed material. And so, we create the textiles and then we send them to a sewing center where it’s then sewn into apparel, homeware, gifts, those kinds of things that then we sell in retail outlets online and to corporate companies in Malaysia.
Freda Liu
Right. And in this case, these artisans are from the B40 community.
Amy Cox Blair
Yes. So, the seamstresses are. And then in COVID, we realized there was an obstacle for refugees in particular, having education and work.
So, we’ve since started partnering with another group of Afghan refugees, actually, who were tailors for big brand mass production in Afghanistan and who had come to Malaysia with skill sets but no legal work. So, we were able to help them as well. And currently, they sew all of our men’s shirts.
Freda Liu
Right. Okay. So, how do you measure success, right?
And it’s got to be beyond revenue.
Amy Cox Blair
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I think as an entrepreneur, like, of course, you’re always, I am an entrepreneur, I discovered along the way. So, you’re always living in the future and you’re always seeing the problems and you see what you didn’t achieve.
You know, often, it’s difficult to pull back and celebrate, like, actually, what have we accomplished? So, definitely, revenue is a huge driver for us. Also, the impact.
We measure the impact on every product that we make, whether it’s just our general impact as a brand or also with corporate gifts. So, when you start seeing that you need to hire more people in the community, that’s helpful. We start giving our profit to fund education.
So, we currently sponsor 23 refugee students’ education in Malaysia monthly with our profit.
Freda Liu
Right.
Amy Cox Blair
We’ve seen artisans grow from 30 meters of fabric a week to 300 meters under the partnership of Batik Boutique. So, we’re expanding their capacity.
We’re providing just life skills, business skills, skills they can use, whether they’re work skills inside and outside of Batik Boutique. So, we do try to measure that. The newer thing in the past few years has also been the environmental footprint.
Freda Liu
Right.
Amy Cox Blair
So, we monitor our environment footprint using as much, you know, sustainable fabric and dyes and low waste processes as we can. So, we do, like, tomorrow, my team has their quarterly report to give to me as managers and everybody will report the normal KPIs you would have in any business, our profit loss, our, you know, our leads, our calls, our deals closed, like everything that you would, but each person also, there’s things they report as well in our impact. So, we keep numbers for that.
Freda Liu
Right.
Amy Cox Blair
So, to me, we’re successful when it all grows.
Freda Liu
Right. It’s all of it. It’s like when you say you’ve helped over 150 families because someone’s got a decent wage, right? And even doing something like this, you know, you would have employed a few people, right?
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah, every piece. I think what people don’t often understand, even about Batik, let’s forget the fact that we designed the print, we painted the print, we sewed the print, we designed the pattern for the, you know, piece that you’re wearing. They forget how intricate Batik is.
Like, I would encourage everybody to actually go figure out what it is and see it. Come to our workshops. We teach you how to do it because when you understand the layering, the time, the complexities, and the skill that’s really required, you appreciate it at another level.
Much less the fact that we’re using natural fibers, that’s actually silk, real silk, not polyester from, you know, fast fashion. So, I think when you understand the story behind the workmanship, not just that it’s helping, but the actual workmanship, like that kimono employed like five to seven people in Malaysia. It actually required that many to make it.
So, you know. That is the impact, yeah.
Freda Liu
That’s the impact.
Amy Cox Blair
That is the impact, yeah.
Rhianne Lovell-Boland
Absolutely. And, you know, thanks for sharing about all the business aspects of it. And, you know, let’s talk a bit about the revenues.
Does it mean hiring more artisans and other factors as well?
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah. So, the business model we developed is called inclusive business. It’s a type of social enterprise.
And that’s where the beneficiaries that you’re trying to support and help, they become part of your supply chain. So, the model we have, especially as you said, we’ve been 10 years into this, we’re always tweaking it and seeing where we can grow, of course. But our model is truly clear that as our revenue grows, our impact grows.
Just in October this last year, we actually opened our own production house behind our studio office because we’ve grown the batik production so much that artisans can’t keep up with what we need. And sometimes, you know, they get off on the coloring or the certain design, especially for a corporate company. If they have, you know, if your IKEA yellow and blue, it has to be an exact yellow and blue, or we will all know it was not IKEA.
So, when we work with a brand like that, we have to be incredibly careful and the dyes. So, we actually opened our own production studio where we’re now employing fresh graduates to come and work with us because that’s also a group of people who have this art heart and passion, but they don’t necessarily have a job when they finish. And so, that’s one of our solutions.
We opened our own production center. So, that’s always in the mind of our impact. As we grow, there’s more people that we hire along the way.
Freda Liu
How easy is it to find these artisans? They’re all knocking on your door.
Amy Cox Blair
No,[Laughter] I’m knocking on their door all the time. I mean, in the early days, it was because they’re, you know, had access to all artisans in Malaysia. There’s a thousand or so, you know.
But as we scale and grow, like one of the issues we have with batik artists is that they’re artists. And if working as an artist and working in production are quite different skill sets and personalities. So, we used to need artists to help us design and make a few meters at a time.
But, you know, one of our batik suppliers sends us 300 meters every week. Every week. That’s one, you know.
And I found it difficult to help artists scale. It’s not really the logistics now. We can ship things.
We can, you know, none of, all of that’s sorted in the past five years. But it’s the, it’s actually having them understand how to actually produce and do they want to. So, we have mindset, you know, things to go through.
So, it does make it challenging.
Freda Liu
Right. You know, I know we already sort of addressed the question on how it is to, you know, to make a batik piece. It’s about six to seven people, right?
And to get involved in the whole supply chain. So, I would like to ask is beyond artisans, you’ve also worked with, in a way, supporting these refugee families?
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah. So, we set up, especially with our corporate gift section, sometimes we work with large multinational companies who have very high quantity that physically cannot be produced in Malaysia or in budgets that cannot be. So, we might do it for a marketing reason to do like something produced outside of Malaysia. That doesn’t fall into our brand or our stores.
Everything is Malaysian made and authentic batik. But we might do like a batik inspired design. And we’re clear to say it’s inspired, but it’s not batik.
Freda Liu
Right.
Amy Cox Blair
And in that situation, if we produce overseas, we then take how we create our impact with it as we take part of our profit and fund projects within Malaysia that are not directly associated with Batik Boutique. So, for example, I didn’t like the fact that children, I have three children and I think they all deserve an education.
And I can give them a quality education. And I didn’t like the fact that other people were forced to come to another country who couldn’t give their kids a decent education.
Freda Liu
Or any education.
Amy Cox Blair
Or any education, correct. And I thought this is a good way to pour into children in the next generation to teach them critical thinking skills, to teach them basic human rights that we all have. So, this is where we take profit from some of our bigger contracts and support things in the community outside of our own.
Rhianne Lovell-Boland
Absolutely. And other than just purchase of products, you also have to find other streams of revenues working with corporates. So, how do they support you?
Amy Cox Blair
Corporates are interesting because over the years, they’ve also grown in wanting and I would even say needing to contribute back, whether it’s to community or to the environment. So, big letters came out. You know, in Malaysia, everything has letters, right?
So, it’s like, okay, get the letters right. So, the SDGs came out from the U.N. and many corporate companies got on board with that. ESGs are a newer thing that we speak of.
So, we go to companies and tell them that we can help you actually fulfill your CSR, your SDGs, your ESGs with something that’s real and authentic. So, we might offer training programs. We’ve trained women in Kelantan with Maybank previously, how to have sewing skills.
We might also do corporate team building workshops. That’s something that is either in our studio or on site to help with team building. And we might do corporate gifting.
That’s the other big part. That’s actually the biggest revenue part of our company is corporate gifting, bigger than our retail section, actually, is corporate gifting. So, we can customize, you know, products, logos, packaging, everything.
We’re practically like a design house, basically, for these companies to help them, even with their messaging, like how to gift this to someone to show that, you know, X company actually was doing this in the community. And it’s authentic.
Rhianne Lovell-Boland
It’s great to hear that there is a demand for that.
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah. It’s a growing demand. I mean, we’re still sort of convincing them of it, I think.
But at least there’s a few more out there that are open to be convinced.
Freda Liu
Right
Rhianne Lovell-Boland
Absolutely
Freda Liu
And it looks good on the brand, right, as giveaways.
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah. We make them look good, basically.
Freda Liu
Right. You make them look good.
So, you know, running an impact business, what you’re doing, right, it’s still running a business, right? And it comes with its challenges. So, are there more considerations and challenges than the regular business?
And how so?
Amy Cox Blair
Oh, for sure.
Freda Liu
For sure.
Amy Cox Blair
For sure. Because in the regular business, it’s about one ‘P’ and that’s profit. If you don’t make profit, you don’t exist. And if you don’t, it’s usually about a small group of people at the top or one person who everybody else, however many you scale and grow for, works for them to put into their pocket, end of the day.
And a social enterprise, actually, you must be just as concerned about that ‘P’ of profit because you’re not sustainable if you’re not profitable. Right. But at the same time, we are focused on people and the planet as well.
There’s two other Ps in this. And I’ve noticed that the funny thing is, I think that’s just human nature, but anytime any of us decide we’ll do something for a cause, or we’ll do something good, you now open yourself up to so much criticism and so much assessment. If I told you I just am an American woman here that thought your product was good and I want to scale it and capitalize everything from my own pocket and intention, I wouldn’t get as much pushback and feedback and criticism as I get when I now say, actually, that’s not what I want to do.
I want a profitable business because we all need to live. But I also want to do good to other people, to help communities, to even help Malaysians understand what Batik is and how do you have, you know, a national kind of pride from this heritage of yours. And I want to do it in a way that’s authentic and it’s good to people and it’s pretty and it’s profitable.
Freda Liu
The whole point about Batik, again, people don’t understand the difference between Batik and Batik print.
Amy Cox Blair
Yeah.
Freda Liu
There’s a huge difference. It’s a lot of work.
Rhianne Lovell-Boland
And you just touched on a little bit about scaling up. So you actually want to make Batik Boutique the global brand and Malaysian Batik ala Jim Thompson in Thailand. So what needs to happen to really make that a reality?
Amy Cox Blair
Oh boy, this is a short video. [Laughter] I think we’re on the way. I mean, the fact that we already shipped to 40 countries is pretty cool.
You know, that’s good. It tells me there’s interest there. So this year we’re focused, we’re still expanding our retail because that comes with branding in Malaysia.
And that one has a lot to it, retail. Then I think we’re focused on Singapore this year. We’ve gone down to two different events in a row that we’ve gotten good feedback and changing some designs, patterns, and prints, started running ads more in Singapore.
We sell in the U.S. We’re selling wholesale into boutiques there as well. So I think that’s growing there. I think in Malaysia, we still just need support.
Like we just need help. And that can come in lots of ways. It can come in corporates buying from us.
I mean, I generally am the person who likes help in the form of business, like not necessarily free. I don’t expect it to be free. But, you know, ordering more from we need ambassadors and influencers sharing more about our brand.
We need more Malaysians, like getting behind what is Malaysian Batik and how amazing and special it really is. We need funding. I mean, I think all SMEs need access to different amounts of funding and cash flow is always an issue with an SME.
More media and promoting kind of stuff, all of that. It’s the same as in building any brand. We need all of that.
Freda Liu
All right. And I guess, you know like, call to action for people who want to make a purchase. I always say this, right?
And to buy for impact. Right, if I have something that is of similar quality and one I know will be able to help more people, I would choose that brand. And this is the stuff that you have.
So I guess the call action is for people to buy for impact if you’re going to buy anyway. Yeah. So thanks again, Amy, for being here.
Amy Cox Blair from the Batik Boutique. Freda and Rianne signing out of the Shift.
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