Silk tie with a touch of batik

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.