Tamil Nadu Minister of Handlooms and Textiles Gokula Indira launched new e-commerce site for its Loom World concept, It is the Department's effort to get on the e-commerce bandwagon and market its Loom World concept that will permit individual Handloom Weavers’s cooperative societies to sell their products separately.

Loom World as a concept has been around for a while but it is not as widespread as Cooptex, which is the marketing cooperation for all Cooperative Societies, said a senior department official.

Loom World on the other hand is a more informal concept as it lets each individual cooperative society market its own wares. The scale of Loom World though has always been small. It has only nine showrooms as opposed to Cooptex, its sister brand, which has more than 200, said the official.

Taking Loom World to the digital world is the Handloom Department’s answer to scale up the concept. Co-optex, can handle barely 30 percent of the market that the whole of Handloom cooperatives in Tamil Nadu need. They hope that Loom World, now that it has gone live, will be able to reach a far wider audience than it has so far.

The department to address an even wider reach is also in talks with major e-commerce sites like Flipkart and SnapDeal.

Apart from the launch of the Loom World site, it also marked the beginning of the Special Handloom Expo 2016 and it will boast of stalls from over a 100 Handloom Cooperative Societies from across the State. Products on sale will include silk sarees, veshtis etc. The Expo is expected to net over Rs10 crore in revenue this year.

The Handloom Expo will continue until January 13 at the Vijaya Mahal at Pondy Bazaar in T Nagar