Selling Bamboo is No Cakewalk

Selling bamboo in India is not an easy task - there are many battles to be fought and many prejudices to overcome ! Am I overstating the case? Well just read on....... Bamboo in most parts of India except for the Northeast is considered to be poor man's timber, a pejorative association that is hard to beat. In complete contrast in Northeast India where we hail from, Bamboo is the Staff of Life, omnipresent from birth to death and is thus greatly respected. When we first began working with bamboo in Delhi, we had people very rudely ask us what in blazes were we trying to do with baans ( the Hindi word for bamboo). We were repeatedly told our products were too expensive even though we have always charged fair prices. I remember one particularly elegant bamboo tripod lamp - I once had a client say that they were not going to pay for three sticks of bamboo. Those were the days when no one gave a thought to global warming, let alone climate change and there were plenty of forests still around to be cut down. However, we persisted and over the years have created more than 250 products and have raised awareness about the viability of bamboo to replace wood and plastics. A measure of how much India has changed and how much more conscious people have become of the environment is the fact that now people commend us for working with eco-friendly bamboo.