Good Cultural Products Build Lasting Connections — Local Storytelling in Asian Creative Industries (II)

By Yuanyin in Tokyo

In Indonesia, a women-founded brand called LAWE began with a simple goal: promote traditional Indonesian textiles while creating stable income for rural women weavers.

But the founders soon discovered a problem. Traditional handwoven fabrics were most often turned into clothing, and those garments were expensive enough to remain out of reach for most consumers.

So LAWE made a small but important shift: instead of focusing on clothing, it began turning traditional fabrics into notebook covers, phone pouches and small wallets.

The logic was bigger than the product change. A piece of clothing may be purchased once and worn for years. A notebook cover, by contrast, can become part of a repeated purchasing habit. The relationship between the customer and the weaver no longer ends with a single souvenir.

LAWE co-founder Adinindyah put it clearly: “What we really sell are stories.” Behind every product are women weavers trying to balance family and work, and those stories had rarely been told.

The Limits of a One-Time Connection

Traditional cultural products often follow a simple business model: a visitor arrives, buys an item, and leaves.

The relationship usually ends at the moment of purchase.

That creates a natural ceiling. Cultural products are not always consumables. A customer may buy one souvenir magnet, one pencil or one craft item, but there is often little reason to buy the same thing again. Each sale becomes a one-time transaction, and each new customer must be acquired almost from scratch.

The deeper problem is that one-time sales create one-time value. The business may know what was sold, but not necessarily who the customer is, what they liked, why they bought, or whether they will return.

Subscription: From “Buy Once” to “Stay Connected”

In Lhasa, Xueyu Chisu takes a different approach.

Instead of selling a single journal, it offers an ongoing subscription relationship with Tibetan culture. Each month, subscribers receive a box containing items such as a journal, stickers, Tibetan-paper bookmarks and an AR card. Scanning the card can trigger animated Tibetan cultural content or audio stories from intangible cultural heritage practitioners.

The theme changes every month — one month may focus on Tibetan paper, the next on thangka colors.

The project describes its goal as addressing three weaknesses in the Tibetan cultural market: shallow experience, weak usage scenarios and one-time connection.

That changes the product completely. A journal is no longer just something a customer buys once. It becomes a recurring cultural window that opens every month.

Stamp Collecting: Turning the City Into a Journal

In Penang, Malaysia, Kakpoot offers another model of connection.

Its creator, Fan Yumei, is one of Penang’s few full-time journal artists and hand-carves wooden rubber stamps. Each stamp can take one to two months from design to completion.

But she does not simply want to sell stamps. She hopes to develop a stamp-collecting route during the George Town Festival, allowing visitors to carry a journal around the city, find special stamps at different locations and redeem rewards after completing the route.

The idea transforms a product into an experience. The stamp is the connection point, the journal becomes the map, and the city becomes the content.

Visitors collecting stamps are encouraged to walk through George Town’s old streets, shophouses, temples and cafés. At that point, Kakpoot is no longer simply a stationery brand. It becomes a connector between visitors and the city.

Fan said she hopes the project can bring local artists and government together to create a distinctive tourism route that gives travelers a deeper and warmer experience of Penang.

From Selling Products to Selling Connections

Placed side by side, LAWE, Xueyu Chisu and Kakpoot reveal a common shift: local creative industries are moving from selling products to building relationships.

Selling products means: I make something, you buy it, and the transaction ends.Selling connections means: I build a relationship, you enter it, and the transaction becomes the beginning.

LAWE creates a connection between consumers and Indonesian women weavers. Xueyu Chisu creates a recurring relationship with Tibetan culture. Kakpoot creates a relationship between visitors and the streets of Penang.

The core value is no longer only the object. It is the relationship surrounding the object.

This also changes what “local” means.

In the past, local creative products often focused on local symbols — Tibetan script, Indonesian textiles, Penang architecture. Now, the more valuable layer is the local network behind those symbols: the weaver behind the textile, the cultural practitioner behind the subscription box, the street and neighborhood behind the stamp.

“Local” is no longer only a place.

It is a network of people, stories and repeated interactions.

Commentary | The Compounding Value of Connection

A canvas bag may last three years. A journal may last three months. A stamp can last decades.

But a connection can last much longer.

When a customer buys a second LAWE notebook cover, they may already understand the difference between weaving traditions in Sumatra and Kalimantan. After three months of subscribing to Xueyu Chisu, a user may have learned about Tibetan paper, thangka and incense — and the people behind them. After collecting ten stamps in Penang, a visitor has already walked through ten streets of George Town.

A one-time connection generates one-time value.A lasting connection compounds.

That compounding value is not measured only by how much a brand sells, but by how many relationships it keeps.

Perhaps that is the most important calculation for local creative industries: not how many products were made, but how many people were connected.