Indonesian tech firm supplying local fashion sector

Indonesian tech firm supplying local fashion sector.

Local fashion designer Bayoush Mangesha with scarves and bags she designed with Batik Fractal material | Chung Chow

An Indonesian-based technology startup is serving the Vancouver fashion market while making scientific strides in its home country of Indonesia.

Batik Fractal is the fashion label borne out of Piksel Indonesia, a nine-year-old technology enterprise dedicated to preserving the country's tradition of batik textile art. The seven-person company developed JBatik – a computer program that uses mathematical algorithms to create patterns for textile design – which allows artisans to preserve their historic art form while gaining experience in technology.

Using the program, Indonesia-based designers develop patterns, hire artisans to translate the designs on fabric using the manual art form of batik and ship the finished textiles to fashion designers abroad.

Fashion hubs currently benefiting from the Batik Fractal label include Sydney, Los Angeles and Vancouver.

"We found there was a link with mathematical formulas and batik," said Piksel Indonesia/Batik Fractal CEO Nancy Margried. "In terms of patterns, we see there is a mathematical property in it."

In 2007, Margried, along with her co-founders Muhammad "Luki" Lukman and Yun Hariadi, produced research to prove their hypothesis that batik art could be done using mathematical sequences through the use of technology.

By 2009, Indonesian batik earned a spot on the representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Batik Fractal tapped into the importance the Indonesian government placed on preserving the cultural heritage and scooped up public funds to train and educate underserved communities in Bandung.

Vancouver-based designer Bayoush Mangesha, founder of the non-profit fashion organization Devi Arts Collective, uses Batik Fractal textiles and champions the empowerment of women through their art.

She said most of the artisans she works with are female and paying fair wages is a Devi Arts Collective requirement.

"I pay them a fair wage because they're artisans themselves. Sewing in a straight line, sewing in a circle, sewing textiles into leather – that's difficult and they're artisans, and that's the design I'm giving them, so I like to make sure they're getting paid fairly."

As for Margried's partiality to working with women, she said it's a tradition in her mother country.

"Traditionally, [batik] was done by your grandmother, then passed down to your mother, who passed it down to you, and now you pass it down to your daughter. Women do it because it's a very delicate skill. … So we decided to apply this technology to women workers, to women batik artisans, because that's the centre of the skill."

Another factor in involving women in the program was the lack of education opportunities available to them in the Bandung slum where Batik Fractal's first workshop was set up.

"These women are simple women," said Margried. "They're probably only educated in elementary or high school, so the confidence is not there. They don't speak out, they don't know their rights, they don't have information that they can do this for themselves."

According to Margried, only 30% of those signed up for the JBatik program training were women, but women usually had a higher success rate with the program.

"Because technology training is associated with men, it's more likely [the women] think it's going to be too difficult for them," she said. "The expectation of society for women working with technology is not there."

That 30% of women echoes UNESCO statistics on Indonesians involved in science, technology and innovation research. As of 2005, 30.5% of the researchers in the field were women.

"They think it's a masculine thing. They think, 'Technology is so sophisticated, it's not for women,' but we see that we really want to influence women in this."

Piksel Indonesia reports annual revenue of roughly $50,000. The company employs six independent freelance contractors, including workshop owners, leather-makers and tailors.

Locally, Batik Fractal designs can be found at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology and at pop-up markets where Vancouver-based designers from Devi Arts Collective show their textile creations.