MARKET
Barefoot is a clothing and lifestyle store selling unique lines. It is also a thriving export business, fine-art gallery, restaurant and bookshop. The heart of the brand, however, remains the design and production of colourful handmade fabrics whose unique designs are based firmly on the artistic vision of one woman.
The Sri Lankan textiles market is driven largely by the apparel-manufacturing industry, which accounts for around half of Sri Lanka’s industrial exports by value – it earned US$ 2.55 billion in 2005. However, 90% of the fabric used by the apparel sector is imported. The remainder is provided by Sri Lanka’s indigenous textiles industry, which also supplies the domestic market. Hand-woven fabrics or handlooms comprise a very small segment of this market.
Although hand-woven fabrics are, financially speaking, a niche market, they have disproportionate importance in cultural and fashion terms. Partly, this is a legacy from an ancient and hallowed Sri Lankan weaving tradition – much neglected in colonial times, but revived after independence. This is partly due to the influence of Barbara Sansoni, the artist and designer whose vision and work are the very essence of Barefoot.
Today, Barefoot competes at the apex of the Sri Lankan clothing, homeware and lifestyle retail market, with a profile that is more exclusive than most upmarket brands in this segment. Barefoot’s customers are affluent, highly educated, cosmopolitan Sri Lankans, and members of the upper echelons of Sri Lanka’s expatriate and diplomatic communities. They enjoy elegant informality and tend to prefer natural products over artificial ones. Most pertinently, they distinguish themselves from others by their good taste and educated aesthetic sense.
Despite this exclusive and somewhat limited customer base, the Barefoot brand enjoys widespread recognition and acceptance. To Sri Lankans, Barefoot is an aspirational brand of a very particular kind: it isn’t enough simply to be able to afford Barefoot products; one has to deserve them.
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ACHIEVEMENTS
Barefoot won a Presidential Export Award in 1984. But the people at Barefoot tend to downplay awards and trophies, taking pride in achievements of a different kind, instead.
One of these is the provision of steady and gainful employment to a large number of economically disadvantaged women. While its owners stress that their company is not a charity, this aspect of Barefoot – which is largely unknown to its customers – forms an integral part of its business model and has influenced the development of the brand.
The story of Barefoot begins in 1964, with an invitation extended to Barbara Sansoni by the head of the Sri Lanka Chapter of the order of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, a Roman Catholic religious order devoted to helping girls and women. Mother Good Counsel, an energetic and determined Irishwoman, had started a weaving centre at Nayakakande, in Wattala, to provide employment and income for women who had found refuge with the order. The fabrics produced by the centre were of good quality, but they needed something more to make them attractive to buyers. Recalling that Barbara, the daughter of a friend, was an artist of repute, Mother Good Counsel asked her to create appealing fabric designs that her girls could weave on their looms.
To fulfil this commission, Barbara had to learn about weaving and the intricacies of matching yarns of different colours on the loom. This is a difficult task, to say the least, and her hard-won mastery of it resulted in the unique colours and designs that distinguish Barefoot products from others. But learning to weave was merely a technical challenge; the conceptual side of things was even more demanding, for Barbara was determined that these handlooms – the product of traditional craft skills – should sport original designs inspired by the landscapes, colours and rhythms of Sri Lanka.
To this end, she travelled the length and breadth of the island, observing, sketching, and taking notes and photographs. The result was a series of notebooks in which are distilled the very essence of Sri Lanka. A visit to a fishing community becomes a set of notes and colour-swatch combinations entitled ‘beach’, ‘sail’ and so on; the colours and rhythms of the Kandy perahera, a village marketplace and hundreds of other Sri Lankan scenes are extracted and preserved in the same way.
Returning to Mother Good Counsel and her girls, Barbara oversaw the transmutation of her vision into fabric. The results were superior to anything the elderly nun had expected: the cloth flew off the shelves! The weaving centre soon found itself unable to cope with the demand. More centres were opened – often in places where the craft tradition of weaving was strong – and providing employment for more of Mother Good Counsel’s magdalens.
Today, Barefoot continues to source nearly all its fabric from weaving centres run by the Good Shepherd order. The company rents working space at these centres at market rates and employs the weavers directly. Barefoot proudly emphasises that it takes work to women, not women to work. In many rural areas, the village weaving centres it supports form the backbone of the local economy.
Bound with this significant social contribution are two other achievements of which Barefoot is equally proud: the preservation of an ancient Sri Lankan craft skill; and the creation of a unique aesthetic steeped in the colours, scenes and traditions of the country. All Barefoot products participate in this aesthetic: each is a recognisably Barefoot creation. At the core of this identity lies the alchemy of colour created and passed on by Barbara Sansoni.
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HISTORY
Once the Good Shepherd girls had begun producing saleable fabric, the question arose as to how and where to sell it. The first retail outlet was Barbara’s own home in Colombo. Success brought expansion: the little shop soon had its own building and began selling carefully-selected household items – crockery, glassware, simple stools and tables – along with the fabrics and furnishings that were its main stock-in-trade.
Its location, down a quiet residential lane, was hardly ideal. In the early 1970s, seeking a more accessible outlet, Barbara opened a shop at Galle Face Court and called it Barefoot. The name, with its connotations of informality, bohemianism and a simple life elegantly lived, still harmonises perfectly with its core brand values.
Throughout the 1970s, Barefoot remained an oasis of quality and good taste for Sri Lankan householders. In addition to furnishing, linen and fabrics, the store began to offer finished articles – clothing (sarongs, introduced at the end of the decade, proved especially popular), soft toys, bags and wall furniture. As well as attracting discerning local customers, these products became popular with tourists and other visitors from abroad, a fact that hinted at export-market potential. In the latter half of the decade, the company began exploring that potential.
The export business developed slowly. This was intentional: there were supply-side constraints; and besides, Barbara Sansoni’s key concerns were artistic and quality-related, not commercial. Overseas retailers were chosen as much for their understanding of these issues and a sympathetic outlook, as for their marketing abilities. Many were friends of the family. These relationships have proved long-standing – one Japanese retailer, for example, has been a customer and friend for over twenty years.
Even as the management of the company passed to a new generation in the 1980s, exports grew in importance. Today, they account for some 35% of Barefoot’s revenue. Barefoot products are now available from selected retailers in Australia, France, Japan, the Maldives, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the US and the UK.
Yet, exports notwithstanding, its retail operations in Sri Lanka remain vitally important to Barefoot, less as profit centres than in terms of the role they play in exemplifying, renewing and disseminating the key values and imagery of the brand. It is through them that Barefoot maintains its position at the apex of the Sri Lankan clothing and lifestyle market.
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PRODUCT
The basic Barefoot product is hand-dyed, hand-woven natural fabric, mainly cotton. Yarn is obtained mostly from India and coloured with environmentally-friendly Ciba-Geigy® dyes. Sales of unsewn fabric account for roughly 18% of company revenue.
Brand values are guarded and cherished by the company’s fabric designers, who have undertaken long apprenticeships with Barbara Sansoni, share her vision, and make frequent reference to her notebooks and fabric archives. Barbara herself continues to inspire the designers and plays a key role in creative decision-making.
Finished articles – clothing, soft toys and bags – make up the next most important product lines. In addition to making imaginative use of Barefoot fabrics, these articles must pass the triple test of simplicity, functionality and durability. Design remains key, and designers are often identified by names on labels or store displays – this gives them a sense of ownership of, and responsibility for, a particular design.
Non-fabric items sold at Barefoot are sourced from traditional craftspeople by an associate company, Sansoni Warehouse. These items, too, are carefully selected for conformity with brand values.
The decentralisation of production facilities and their modest size is viewed as an asset. Because of these factors, small (even very small) orders can be easily accommodated, and new designs and styles brought to the market quickly. The enables Barefoot to respond with unusual rapidity to new trends and changing demands.
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RECENT DEVELOPMENT
Over the past decade or so, Barefoot has begun extending the ambit of its operations beyond its core businesses, achieving this through a series of synergistic line extensions. The Barefoot Bookshop carries titles chosen for their appeal to Barefoot customers, but they also reflect the interests and concerns of the management. The Barefoot Gallery exhibits and sells the work of selected members of Colombo’s thriving artistic community. Together with the adjacent Garden Cafe, the Barefoot Gallery is also a venue for artistic and musical events.
On the export side, an important development has been the choice of Barefoot products by two famous hotel chains – Four Seasons and Six-Senses – the latter, to obtain fabric for furnishing for their resorts in the Maldives, the Middle East, Thailand and Vietnam, an outgrowth of the thriving Maldivian resort business; the former, to obtain sarongs, toys and bags as guest giveaways and for sale at their retail outlets.
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PROMOTION
An unconventional company, Barefoot pursues an appropriately unconventional approach to advertising and marketing. It does not have a sales or marketing department, nor is growing the business in volume or revenue terms year-on-year regarded as a priority. The profitability of product lines is secondary to their aesthetic appeal and quality, and on these issues, it is Barefoot’s designers – rather than marketing experts or even customers – who have the final say.
In the beginning, all Barefoot advertisements were written, designed and produced by Barbara Sansoni herself, ensuring harmony of promotions and products by the simplest possible means. These ads were peppered with eccentric little motifs and sayings that exemplified the Barefoot brand personality. While present-day advertising is professionally created and placed, its associations, images and personality are still drawn from the same source. The most recent ad campaign relates the colours and patterns of Sri Lanka to those of Barefoot products in a way that clearly draws on Barbara’s notebooks of the 1960s.
Overseas distribution continues to be executed through personal contacts and these relationships remain informal. However, the company does participate in industry fairs and international roadshows. In the end, Barefoot’s marketing relies heavily on reputation and word of mouth.
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BRAND VALUES
As brands go, Barefoot is in a most fortunate position: its strength relies not on an image that is artificially created in an advertising agency, but on a genuine, closely-held, personal vision. This vision consciously informs every operation of the company - from hiring policy, to investment decisions, to the choice of overseas representatives.
The company’s management is keenly aware of this advantage, and it strives to preserve and develop it in a number of ways. One of these, naturally, is its artist founder’s ongoing input. Others include the accumulation of archival material and the creation of a living craft tradition within the company itself. Not least, it must be remembered that Barefoot is a family entity: another name for its brand values could be ‘family tradition’.
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THINGS YOU DONT KNOW ABOUT BareFoot
♥ Barefoot products are featured at World Of Music And Dance (WOMAD) festivals held around the world, because its special design lines are in keeping with festival themes.
♥ Assembly-line techniques are never used at Barefoot.
♥ Overseas customers are often encouraged to reduce their first order.
♥ Barbara Sansoni hates the word ‘factory’.
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www.barefoot.lk
