My first week with AIACA
As this is my first week with AIACA (www.aiacaonline.org), I am primarily doing a lot of reading to familiarize myself with their operations. I’ve also learned a lot about Craftmarrk (http://www.craftmark.org/), their certification initiative that denotes genuine Indian handicrafts, as far as the types of organizations they work with, products offered, and craft processes.
I started the week by meeting AIACA’s Executive Director Adarsh Kumar on Sunday, March 23rd briefly for a greeting and introduction as he previously indicated that he would be out of the office most of my first two weeks there.
In Adarsh’s absence, I’ve had a lot of interaction with the rest of the AIACA staff. Their Accounts Manager has been actively helping me find accommodation and has been tough on negotiating rent and lease terms. On Thursday after work, two other colleagues took me to the Rajiv Gandhi Hast Shilp Bhavan (an all state handicraft emporium where non profit organizations get a break in the high rent district near Connaught Place) to visit a current trade exhibition, learn more about the types of products they work with, and visit some of the vendors which carry the Craftmark logo.
Trying to figure out how to add value during my first week, I’ve come up with a ton of ideas regarding the upcoming Craftmark brochure- ways to change layout/ design to generate higher sales/ page and reduce production costs as it looks like a very pricy publication selling relatively low cost items. (I’ve done three programmatic brochures for the Merrill Lynch Foundation and hope to be of assistance in this area.) However, I still have lots of questions regarding the publication (costs, distribution, potential for online, timing- semiannual with products catering to the different seasons, etc.). Since I’m actually uploading this posting during my second week, I have learned more about their wholesale catalogue as far as future plans and offered some suggestions. The Craftmark website really needs to be updated and they hope to have the resources to do it in the next year. As for learning Hindi- my language cd is not so good.