The Batik Boutique

An unexpected friendship leads to a fair trade social enterprise.

- Elaine Tan

In 2009, when Amy Blair moved to Kuala Lumpur with her husband and toddler, she met Ana, a single mother of two teenagers who was looking for work. Amy decided to ask Ana to teach her Bahasa Malaysia. The friendship blossomed along with Amy’s language skill. “I began to have a deeper understanding of her and her struggles. We are both mothers who would do anything for our kids. The only difference was the circumstances we were born into, which you don’t get to choose,” recalls the native Texan.

It became Amy’s mission to help her new friend. Together, they decided Ana would make batik coasters and aprons which Amy could gift to family and friends during her trip back to the USA that Christmas. “Two things happened: people liked the colour scheme and patterns because we didn’t have anything like batik in the US. And they liked the story behind the products, that it was helping somebody. They started asking me if I had more.”

Back in Kuala Lumpur, Ana was ecstatic to hear the positive response. She had ‘recruited’ Noor, a mother of seven children who lived at the same low-cost flats. At times the family went without electricity or enough food. Now two pairs of eyes looked to Amy expectantly.

“I wasn’t looking to start anything! I was just helping a friend,” recalls Amy, but she felt a need to keep on going. She got friends on both sides of the globe involved and when sales grew, she started selling at bazaars. Offers came from the US to take up products. That was how The Batik Boutique came about, a fair trade social enterprise promoting artisanal products, particularly those made from batik. They went online in 2012 and also branched out into corporate gifts. “People liked that we were meeting a need and that they could help the local community by buying our products,” Amy shares.