“The international business graduate came back home from the UK and started shouldering the company with her mother in 2013. The business has picked up since her return. Ms. Viet pointed to the youngest of her five daughters. Anyone who wants to know ho”
Mats in Vietnamese culture are emblematic of close-knit, sacred unions. They are where families gather to share the food tray for meals, and sometimes to huddle for intimate discussions. In the olden days, layers of mats were where local musicians sat, forming a stage during festivals to play folklore songs for villagers across the country. On full moon nights, a mat would be spread in the home yard, allowing people to enjoy the cool evening breeze. New, thick mats were usually folded in the corner of every house, waiting for honourable guests. Upon their visit, the host would unroll the mat to sit and sip tea, and later enjoy a welcoming, cordial meal. For newly-wed couples, a pair of mats are usually gifted by relatives wishing them a life-long happy companionship.
To make such an intimate item, a surprising amount of manual work and craftsmanship are required. Ask Mai Anh Dao, a third-generation mat producer in Nga Son district, in Vietnam’s northern province of Thanh Hoa, a place well-known for churning out the country’s best quality mats for centuries. “It takes at least five to six months to grow the sedge to reach a person’s height,” Dao said as she drove her scooter across an emerald field of seagrass one afternoon last fall, “and then split the strands before drying them on sand under the sun for days and weaving into a mat.” There should be no rain around this harvesting time, or the straws/stems will lose their signature white gold color. And you also need the right skillful hands for that last important step.
Collecting sedge in Nga Son, Thanh Hoa
Long before her family-run company, Viet Trang, entered the trade, Nga Son mats had already been famous for over a hundred years. At their peak, they were presented to the kings as a local specialty gift to the capital, and favored by wealthy families, signaling the owner’s nobility.
The secret, as told to Anh Dao, lies in two factors—the artisans and the soil.
“It grows poor crops of rice, but it offers the best seagrass,” the 32-year-old said of the brackish marsh the field perches on. The intertidal tuft of land is tucked between two rivers, the Day and the En. For eons, their freshwater has diluted the sea tides rising from the East Vietnam Sea. On this slip of land sprouts the shiny natural fibres that are delicately thin, yet soft and elastic once dried, and hence perfect for the pushes and pulls of handweaving.
But for the humble plants to be transformed into the colourful and stout layers of sedge mats, it takes the craftsmanship the local makers have built over lifetimes. They are mostly women and some are also growers.
One mat requires two people to weave. Apprentices spend days to complete one mat, while a pair of skilled artisans can finish three to four of them within one day. Viet Trang Export Co., Ltd is currently hiring two dozen of them as full-time weavers and 500 more as seasonal employees working either at their own home or in the company’s handicraft workshop in Nga Son Trade Village Industrial Zone. “We also outsource another 500 growers and households in the community to process the plant,” Anh Dao said. “The villages have been doing this since forever, well establishing this micro supply chain for producers like us.”
Like artisans elsewhere, seagrass growers and mat makers in Nga Son have also witnessed the takeover of modernity since the economic Doi Moi. Plastic materials offer more colorful options while proving easier to clean and much cheaper. Factories using machinery instead of skilled human labourers emerged across the country as competitors. The market itself has been shrinking as more customers are inclined to new options like mattresses and bamboo sleeping mats (chieu truc), while the price of handwoven sedge products kept dropping, dissuading the earnest craftsmen. Growing up, Anh Dao has seen more and more patches of the endless seagrass field converted to rice growing ones, or simply deserted as more people moved elsewhere for better-paying jobs.
The company she is currently running took a different approach. Founded in 1986 by Dao’s mother, Tran Thi Viet, a master mat weaver in her own right, Viet Trang has channeled the local specialty products to exports: the Soviet Union in the late 80s, China in the 90s and 2000s, and, until recently, Japan. Not only fetching higher profits, the international trades have helped the local tradition stay afloat. Its product line has been diversified, too, to baskets, rugs, and poufs. “So the craftsmanship could live on, breathing into modern, practical items for daily use,” Anh Dao said. “We did not go the path various craft villages in Vietnam have taken, turning into souvenir-only manufacturers.”
The international business graduate came back home from the UK and started shouldering the company with her mother in 2013. “The business has picked up since her return.” Ms. Viet pointed to the youngest of her five daughters. “Anyone who wants to know how we have gone this far can just ask Anh Dao. She is in charge now.”
“Of course this is not what my mother had planned for me,” Dao giggled when recalling the “controversial” decision. Viet wanted all her kids to stay as far away from this uncertain, difficult work as possible. Stable deskjobsinanair-conditionedofficewere the goal in the mother’s eyes. But Dao does not think her return was an accident. Back in college, she already ventured into running a tiny business in her spare time, selling mats produced by her mother’s company in Hanoi. Later on, her first job was for the national handicraft association. “I think it is in my blood,” she said.
n the years of studying abroad, Anh Dao witnessed a growing pool of customers worldwide who appreciate and are willing to pay high prices for products braided with environmentally friendly natural fibres. Nga Son by then had everything ready, she said, it just needed a little push of market insights and updates. “We have plenty of those material sources in Vietnam,” Dao said of not only the seagrass but also agricultural leftovers like corn husk and water hyacinth. “Instead of burning them, skillful workers here can turn such stems all into exportable goods.” With the help of a close friend, Uyen Le, who has a knack for handmade designing, Anh Dao gradually steered the business to tap into the rising demands of sustainable interiors in the Western world.
Ms. Dao in the 2019 Women Entrepreneurs Week in Zurich, Switzerland organized by Swiss EP
Challenges soon emerged as weavers who were accustomed to certain life-long practices showed some resistance when Dao and her young team persuaded them to adopt different patterns over the seasons. At the same time, export market expansion demands the family business develop more effective operational management tools for the sales and a consistent internal control system. In the first shaky years after taking charge of Viet Trang, Anh Dao got support from her sisters and her mother, a guru of weaving who would learn new braiding techniques and teach them to the workers. The young entrepreneur had help from the outside, too. In 2015, the company joined EFD, where through training the management team learned strategies of branding and building business culture, as well as formulating a clear assessment of its social impact in the community.
“To build this internal culture, it could be as simple as sharing customers’ feedback with our weavers,” Anh Dao said, “letting them know of the appraisals they earn can make a great difference. It grows their connections with the objects they create, and with the company as well.” The young manager also invests more in marketing and branding, from hiring professional photographers to take proper pictures of the products to launching online platforms to showcase them. “We adapt story-telling in our communications with customers,” Dao said, “for instance drawing their attention to our environmental-friendliness in the use of natural colorings, to our long- standing local craft community.”
Another great takeaway from EFD, she added, was the reassuring feeling that she is not alone. A few years ago, her decision to return home and work on a traditional business invited doubt not just from others but also from herself. “Projects like EFD gather together crazy heads like me,” she said. “It is great to find out that I have accomplices and we can learn from each other.”
From a small mat producer in the coastal town of Nga Son, Viet Trang has now grown into a business bringing in a half-million dollars in income, keeping hundreds of local female artisans employed while introducing their long-established folk handicrafts to the world. The ripple effects from the Covid-19 pandemic last year caused the exporting company to tremble at first, but later opened a new window of opportunity. “When more people are kept in their home during lockdowns, they tend to grow interested in decorating their surroundings,” Anh Dao observed. “We have seen a spike in order volume coming in from our partners overseas.”
The young entrepreneur is eyeing re- introducing Nga Son mats and other hand woven handicrafts to the domestic market, whose younger middle- income group has developed a taste for indigenous aesthetics, she believes. Optimistic about the development of e-commerce in Vietnam, the company has started to pilot selling a few items on leading online platforms like Tiki. “Plus being known nationally would mean a lot to our artisans,” Anh Dao said. “Aside from the stable job, I think having them proud of what they are doing is also a great way to keep them in the industry, and hence keep this craftsmanship alive.”
Phuong Nhung