Laos Home Decoration and Home textiles (HDHT)

One of the current relevant market trends in demand (for Asia) is the increase in importance and number of niche markets, particularly for fair trade, handmade, sustainability, eco-friendly products. This offers Laos an unique opportunity to position itself in the niche markets based on their unique story: hand woven hand spun cotton and natural dyes; weaving skills, house hold looms all over the country which provides extra income next to farming income. The objective of this project is therefore to position Laos in the market as THE niche market in Asia for sourcing products made with hand-spun and handwoven cotton and dyed with natural dyes such as Indigo. In a tailor-made approach that provides technical assistance to exporters, the sector associations LHA and LPHA, the Laotian government and facilitates public private collaboration to address the mentioned issues in the export enabling environment as well as others not addressed by CBI. The essence of this project will be to support SMEs in becoming export ready and link them to the relevant niche markets. In a project in Nepal for this sector CBI was successful in branding small companies who produce low volumes. This was done through a clustering trajectory with the small SME and is essential to ensure the same level of quality and to be able to spread orders. The sector is characterised by a community based production model and needs to be better connected to the SMEs and in end to the buyers’ requirements. This would mean CBI however that more support through CBIs Export Enabling Environment interventions (and/or through other stakeholders) is needed to go deeper into the chain to improve quality and production efficiency. This needs to be done with support of national stakeholders and/or international donors.