In March 2022, Women on Wings and the Jharkhand State Livelihood Promotion Society (JSLPS) agreed to collaborate on co-creating and growing a sustainable brand, Palash. Palash is the umbrella brand of various products which are handmade or processed by rural women in the state of Jharkhand. By strengthening the brand, Women on Wings and JSLPS aim to create additional jobs and regular income for women in rural Jharkhand.
A flying start
Since March 2022, six on-site workshops in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand, and six online follow-up sessions along with several planning calls have been conducted by the Women on Wings experts with the Palash Task Force team. The main idea for these workshops is to create a strategic approach to scale Palash, set realistic targets, identify gaps, and plan a road map to achieve these targets.
The first workshop helped gain a better understanding of the Palash ecosystem, leading to a brief mapping of the entire supply chain and extracting the why, how, what of Palash. To ensure the momentum, a second workshop was conducted in April where a detailed SWOT analysis was derived serving to arrive at a gap analysis of Palash. Following the analysis, the teams jointly prioritized certain areas of interventions for next workshops – branding & marketing, HR, cost pricing and supply chain.
In depth workshops
The branding & marketing workshop shed light on various aspects of brand identity. Says Shilpa Mittal Singh, joint managing director at Women on Wings: “It was jointly concluded that rebranding and representation of Palash through distinctive and appropriate brand names, logos, and taglines was necessary. Our experts created various logos for the Palash brand and its three product categories. After deciding upon the final designs, the next step will be to work with our experts on developing a brand book for Palash.”
The HR workshop focused on defining the organizational structure that would best fit the purpose of Palash. Shilpa: “Based on the inputs, two options of the organizational structure were developed by our team. A final structure has been approved by the JSLPS management.” Currently, JSLPS is hiring key management level professionals for Palash.
A cost pricing workshop was conducted which assisted in developing sample formats for each of the three product categories. One product from each category was taken as reference with various district level data and financial records to develop this format. This will further be refined for every single product under Palash through a dedicated cost pricing team.
Concludes Shilpa: “Thanks to the ambition and eagerness of the Palash team much has been done in the first half year of our cooperation. Looking ahead we are planning to conduct additional on-site workshops and online follow-up sessions on specific topics, like supply chain development, to continue working on further bridging the gaps. It is exciting to work together on creating many new job opportunities for rural women in Jharkhand.”
Photography JSLPS | women farmers
