Craft Challenges To Attract Interests Of The Young Generation Wearing Batik

Event Celebrates National Batik Day 2024 (Yesica Sitinjak/VOI)

Batik is an Intangible Cultural Heritage from Indonesia by UNESCO which must be preserved. In preserving batik, of course, it cannot be separated from the role of craftsmen who make batik and people who wear it, especially the younger generation.

The previous young generation's view of batik is much different. This was expressed by the Founder and CEO of Oemah Etnik (OE), Rizki Triana, a local fashion brand that focuses on developing batik cloth.

"The difficulty from the start was educating young people. So it wasn't like it used to be now, you could use sneakers using batik like that," said Rizki Triana at the 2024 National Batik Day Celebration of Tokopedia and ShopTokopedia in the Kuningan area, South Jakarta, on Wednesday (2/10/2024).

At the beginning of building the OE brand in 2011, Rizki Triana said the challenge faced was having to provide education to the younger generation at that time that batik could be used casually. He had to design batik cloth beautifully to be able to attract young people.

"To educate from the start that batik can be used daily and casual. Finally we know the rules, so to make young people interested it is visual. So if we build a campaign, we try to be as beautiful as possible, so they are interested in using it and when using it find out what meaning it is," he explained.

However, in recent years, Rizki said that many young people already know about batik and wear it in their daily lives. For today's batik craftsmen, the challenges faced are not about education, but creating rare products to keep young people in demand.

"But now they (young people) are already literate. So the challenge now is that we have to make activities or marketing about products that are not yet on the market to steal the hearts of the younger generation, who are already literate about batik," he said.

The unique batik design but can also be used all the time or timeless is the main choice of today's young generation. With such a design, the batik will not miss the trend even though it has been several years since its manufacture.

Our design is very, very timeless. Some bought it a few years ago, it was used until now, it still doesn't miss the trend," concluded Rizki Triana.