5 MINUTES WITH… Sophie Garnier of Kalinko, which sells handmade textiles and homewares from Myanmar
Through her online company Kalinko, Sophie is giving weavers from Myanmar the chance to showcase their skilfully handcrafted textiles and homewares
HOW DID YOU FIND ALL THE WONDERFUL WOVEN PRODUCTS THAT YOU HAVE ON YOUR SITE?
My husband and I moved to Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, in 2014 with his job, and at weekends we’d go out exploring the country. The markets there are filled with traditional woven pieces handmade by craftspeople and I bought a fantastic selection of them for our flat.
Friends and family kept asking us to find the same pieces for their own homes in the UK, so I decided to set up a website where I could curate these beautiful wares from markets all around Myanmar and make them available to an international market. WHAT DOES KALINKO MEAN?
It derives from the name of a tribe – Kalinkaw. There’s a region in the north west of Myanmar called Chin State where there are a large number of different ethnic groups. The Kalinkaw tribe are known for their remarkable weaving skills, so that seemed a really appropriate name – and it’s easy to pronounce!
TELL US MORE ABOUT THE CRAFTSPEOPLE
In Myanmar there isn’t much demand outside of tourism for handmade textiles and furniture – most local people buy inexpensive, factory-made alternatives that are imported from China. The majority of makers end up crafting as a hobby, supplementing their income with farming or other work. When I launched the site, I was working with roughly 30 individual weavers and makers – that’s now grown to 95. Crucially, because there’s no ‘middle man’, we can pay them a fair internationally agreed wage.
WHAT’S LIFE IN MYANMAR LIKE?
Yangon is becoming a really cosmopolitan city and there’s a great expat community. For the first three years we lived amid the hubbub of downtown, in a top-floor flat overlooking the busy river. We’ve recently moved north to a quiet house with a beautiful garden full of wild orchids and little tropical frogs!
Find out more at kalinko.com and to get a 20 per cent discount on its products, see our exclusive reader offer on page 152
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