In 2023, Baptiste Garnier and Tanguy Poudret, two former students of the International Trade Masters at IAE Pau-Bayonne, set up Kashgar Artisanat. Through this project, the two friends are promoting the craft skills of Central Asia and giving women in Kyrgyzstan a stable, year-round job.

Can you introduce yourself in a few words? What IAE Pau-Bayonne courses have you graduated from? What have your career paths been so far?

Kashgar Artisanat is run by two graduates of the International Trade Master's programme at the IAE Pau Bayonne, Bayonne Campus, class of 2017: Tanguy, aged 26, began his studies with a DUT in business management in Angers from 2014 to 2016. He then spent a year travelling around South-East Asia, starting by hitchhiking across Europe. Baptiste, aged 27, DUT marketing techniques at Sceaux from 2014 to 2016, then civic service in Northern Macedonia in 2016-2017. Then we met during our Master's degree in International Trade from 2017 to 2021. We left together for our exchange semester in South Africa in 2020. After the Masters, Tanguy worked as a Business Analyst in Frankfurt and then in Turin, until October 2022. Baptiste worked as an export salesman for an eco-friendly packaging company, which he left in July 2022 to concentrate on this joint project. In November 2022 we started a D2E (Diplôme d'étudiant-entrepeneur) with the Hesam Entreprendre incubator in order to launch Kashgar Artisanat.

Tell us a little about your Kashgar Artisanat business. How did you come up with the idea for this business? What do you do? What do you offer? You are free to present your business here...

Kashgar Artisanat promotes Central Asian craftsmanship in interior design. We offer wool felt rugs from Kyrgyzstan with colourful designs inspired by the traditional motifs of the nomadic Kyrgyz community. These rugs are made from wool felt, traditionally known as "Shyrdak". Their original design and colours bring a new dimension to interior decoration, and the felt creates a uniquely comforting atmosphere.

The project was born out of a meeting with the project's main craftswoman in Kyrgyzstan in September 2022. During a solo trip, Baptiste came across the workshop and was initially touched by the craftswoman's involvement and dynamism in her work. We then chatted at length on WhatsApp in the weeks after the meeting, and returned to Kyrgyzstan in May 2023, this time accompanied by Tanguy. On discovering the range of wool felt rugs she could offer, and her motivation to set up a project with us, we decided to devote our efforts to launching this partnership. Our main mission is to promote the craftsmanship of this little-publicised area by introducing these creations to interior design in France.

Through your business, how are you committed to CSR? Why is it important for you to commit to this mission? Here you can talk about the sustainable and social dimension of your business...

Our main aim is to be socially useful. Today, the carpets are made between autumn and spring and sold mainly in July/August. This means that the women artisans work periodically throughout the year, and their day-to-day lives are largely devoted to running the house and bringing up the children, while their husbands generally work long hours and provide for most of the family's financial needs. So, thanks to sales spread throughout the year, we hope to enable the women in this workshop in Kyrgyzstan to benefit from stable employment throughout the year. Most of the work can also be carried out from home, which helps to maintain a family balance, as the women can keep an eye on the children and daily chores. Our aim is to contribute to the emancipation of women in Kyrgyzstan by providing them with a job and a regular income. The craft work they do and the know-how they possess deserve recognition. We are highlighting these women as creators, their unique work being a small-scale craft that it is important to promote, coming from a country that receives so little media coverage.

Secondly, we have a sustainable development objective: from shearing the sheep to finishing the stitching, everything is produced within a radius of a few kilometres of the village in Kyrgyzstan. As part of our ongoing development, we want to set up a fund-raising system that will enable the workshop to finance projects such as reusing the water used to boil the wool during felting, for example.

Do you have any advice or words of advice for students and alumni who, through their professional or personal lives, would like to become more involved in impact projects? It could be a piece of advice, a quote, an inspiration...

I would advise anyone who wants to create an impact project to try and isolate what their own person can contribute to a social or environmental issue. Through our history and our values, we each have something new to contribute to changing different opinions or ways of consuming, and to carrying out a project that reflects who we are. Kashgar Artisanat is a project that reflects who we are, because it explores a culture and a craft that is little known in Europe, and puts the spotlight on other people: these women craftsmen from Kyrgyzstan.


Want to find out more about Kashgar Artisanat ?

https://kashgarartisanat.com/