This Naga woman’s weaving unit is a source of livelihood for women who spin, weave, and warp
Vekuvolu Dozo is a weaver and trainer specialising in the backstrap loom. She established her brand Viko Ethnic in 2020 in Dimapur, Nagaland.
In the relatively young Naga United Village in Dimapur (the village came into existence in 1968), Nagaland, sits Vekuvolu Dozo’s small handloom unit with the backstrap loom or the loin loom, which is a familiar sight in this part of the country.
These looms have been in use for generations in Nagaland, and work such that one end of the loom is often fastened to the wall of the house by bamboo poles. They are set at a distance equal to the breadth of the cloth to be woven, and the other end of the loom is attached to a belt and strapped to the weaver’s back, rendering it the name—backstrap loom.
From this tiny hamlet, Veku runs her ethnic weaving brand, Viko Ethnic, which makes home accessories like table linen, apparel, and more, and now has a formidable line of collections with a customer base from across India. The enterprise has onboarded several other women from the village, many of whom are widows, and has given them the opportunity to earn their livelihood using a skill they are familiar with.
In a chat with HerStory, forty-year-old Veku tells all about becoming an accidental entrepreneur.
Vekuvolu Dozo, 40, runs Viko Ethnic out of Naga United Village, Dimapur in Nagaland.
The early days
Veku grew up watching her mother and sister sit for hours on the loom to make cloth bags and sell them in the local market as a way of income generation.
“I was never interested to weave at first, but when I was about 18, my aunt taught me to weave because it was a custom that needed to be followed,” says Veku, who belongs to the popular Chakhesang tribe in the region.
Once she got married, Veku moved to Uttar Pradesh with her husband. A few years and two children later, Veku decided she wanted to move back to Dimapur to be able to give her children the same sort of upbringing that she received as a child. Once back in her village, Veku decided she had to find ways to earn and support her family as her children were growing and so were their needs.
“Every woman in my village knew how to weave, but we didn’t know how to earn money from it,” says Veku.
Incidentally, at the same time, Antaran, the social enterprise of Tata Trusts, was running a workshop on craft-based businesses in the village, and Veku decided to attend it. Antaran is a key intervention of the Trusts’ Craft-based Livelihood Programme, initiated to bring seminal changes in craft development. Veku got trained in July 2019, and soon after, started working as a weaver. She even attended a couple of exhibitions as part of Antaran’s cluster.
The workshop also turned out to be a trigger of sorts. In November 2020, Veku decided to start her own enterprise, for which she took a microloan, set up a small space in Naga United village, bought more looms, and onboarded a few other local women too.
From creating designs and training her team to mastering social media and getting on Instagram as a retail platform, Veku started thriving on the everyday challenges that came her way as a newly minted businesswoman.
“I realised that the looms we grew up with had so much potential in them. We started to make home décor products and showcased them at different local exhibitions. People started to talk about us and our work, and more orders came our way,” relives Veku.
At Veku's handloom unit in Dimapur
A timely intervention
Since Veku launched her enterprise in the initial months of the pandemic, the team at Antaran helped Veku find various ways of marketing her products, including retailing on online platforms. They also nominated her for the German development organisation GIZ’s Her&Now project, which focused on the ‘Economic Empowerment of Women Entrepreneurs and Start-ups by Women’.
“The intervention from Her&Now came at the right moment for me. It is only thanks to the efforts of others who believed in me that I got a grant of Rs 70,000, which went a long way in stabilising my business at the time,” says Veku, adding that she used the money to get a varied range of raw materials from outside Nagaland.
“In Nagaland, it was very difficult to get yarn of different colours, and I couldn’t afford to dye huge amounts of yarn. The funding from Her&Now helped me buy coloured yarn in bulk and store it at my place so that I could use it later,” says Veku.
In August 2021, Veku decided to take things to the next level and started sowing cotton seeds so as to have complete control of the manufacturing process–from sourcing the raw material to selling the completed product. “The cotton seeds we sowed last year have shown promising results. We want to make and dye our thread, and I believe as a team, we are capable of doing it,” remarks Veku.
Vekuvolu Dozo's family.
Giving back to the community
Although Veku’s story as an entrepreneur is well-known in the region, there is one aspect of her that is still largely unknown and gives a glimpse of the human behind the entrepreneur.
Many years ago, while living in UP with her teacher-husband, Veku came across a six-year-old girl from her community who had lost both her parents and did not have many relatives willing to look after her. Veku decided to adopt the girl, and now, the 16-year-old lives with Veku and her three children as part of the family.
Veku also adopted a boy, now 18 years old, who has been under Veku’s care since his mother died at a young age.
Veku’s handloom products are available on her Instagram handle, which is under her name, and on WhatsApp. The products include handbags, pouches, table linen, pure cotton mekhelas (wrap-arounds), and more. Veku’s products have even travelled as far as Paris through exhibitions.
“I should say I'm blessed because I have a good business, a good team, very good kids, and a very supportive husband,” concludes Veku.
Edited by Megha Reddy