Silk tie with a touch of batik

Bambang Trisno, Contributor, Klaten, Central Java

Silk tie with handmade batik motifs? Some might guess the ethnic touch of the tie only comes from the hands of reputable fashion designers.

Wrong. Such a fine accessory may have been part of your collection for sometime without you even realizing it, and it comes from Sanggrahan, a small village near Prambanan Temple.

Through his company, Eddy Adib pioneered producing these silk ties with classic batik motifs. For his home industry, the native of Pekalongan, Central Java was assisted by 16 workers in producing about 150 handmade silk ties each day.

The man started this business only by chance. In 1980, Eddy, who spent three years at Futhuhiah Islamic boarding school in Mranggen, Semarang, met a Balinese businessman. Thinking that Eddy was a good batik maker, this businessman took him to Bali.

Although he did not know how to make batik, Eddy teamed up with his friend, a real batik maker, to seize the business opportunity that the Balinese businessman offered.

After being in the batik business for a year, he met an American in 1982, who offered him some capital to set up a batik business in Pekalongan. That very year, he moved to his birth place to start this business. But in 1985, due to marketing considerations, he moved his business to Bali.

In 1989 he was tempted to try his luck in the then lucrative property business but failed and lost virtually everything he had earned from his batik business.

Luckily he met a Korean businessman, Kim Sung In, who offered to cooperate with him to make ties of an international standard. Kim also taught him the technique to make these ties. But before their joint venture materialized, Kim had to return to his country because of family affairs.

With the knowledge he learned from Kim, Eddy began his silk tie making business by giving the ties the touch of batik motifs.

The man also followed the international quality standard since 90 percent of his buyers were foreign tourists. Eighty percent of his ties were marketed in Bali.

Now, he also started making silk batik shirts as there was a good demand for this product.

A hand-drawn silk tie of his own batik design is offered at Rp 40,000 and Rp 140,000 per shirt. In the process, he draws the batik designs and then leaves the job to batik makers in Cirebon (West Java), Pekalongan and Surakarta, both in Central Java, to complete.

His problem now is the limited supply of handmade batik silk for shirts. For a demand of 100 pieces of silk batik shirts, he has to wait for five months for the raw material to be available. On the other hand, there is a regular stream of orders and even offers to form joint ventures from foreign investors coming from Malaysia, Japan and even New Zealand.

With the problem, Eddy can meet only domestic demand, serving his loyal customers. Among his regular clients that he declined to name were a noted choreographer, House of Representative's legislators, and a leading batik retail shop with outlets in Jakarta, Surakarta, Yogyakarta and Bali. He also supplies his products to a number of duty-free shops at Ngurah Rai International Airport and a famous shopping mall in Denpasar, Bali.

He claimed that some buyers put their own labels on his products before exporting them. So don't be surprised if one day you'll find a silk tie with batik motif abroad with a famous label but actually, it's made in Klaten.