Coimbatore’s Suguna Kalyana Mandapam took on a bazaar’s bustle on Friday morning as the 11th edition of the FLO Bazaar commenced its two-day run. The exhibition, organised by the city’s FICCI FLO Coimbatore Chapter, is the latest instalment of what has become a fixture on the city’s shopping calendar — and this year’s opening carried a familiar promise: commerce with a cause attached.
The floor holds more than 50 women-led enterprises drawn from Coimbatore and the neighbouring regions, a number that gives the event its scale. What they have brought is broad rather than niche: handwoven sarees and dress materials, then jewellery and homemade food products, alongside paintings and home décor items, wellness products and lifestyle accessories, with enough variety that a visitor could plausibly do a season’s shopping in a single hall. The range is the draw as much as any single stall: practical staples and decorative pieces, side by side.
The purpose, as the organisers describe it, is to give women entrepreneurs a platform to display and market what they make, while nudging entrepreneurship at the grassroots level along. FLO Bazaar, in their telling, serves as a lively marketplace where women-owned businesses can meet customers directly and widen their reach — plain words for something quite practical: a physical venue, real footfall and buyers who can see the work before they pay for it.
The standout this year is the chapter’s Green Vertical initiative. Around 20 women have handcrafted close to 15 varieties of products — jewellery and gift envelopes, along with coasters, pickles, handbags and fruit baskets among them — and the money raised from those sales will be put toward tree plantation efforts across the city. The arithmetic is modest but neat: shopping that ends in shade.
Stewardship is a two-person affair at the top. The chapter’s Chairperson, Parnika Gupta, leads the exhibition, with Vanaja Ramaraj serving as event convenor — the pairing credited by the organisers for this edition’s shape.
The bazaar continues for two days, which leaves ample time for visitors to back women entrepreneurs directly while browsing a diverse spread of handcrafted and locally made goods. The encouraging part, for those inclined to look past the shopping, is the design of the thing: grassroots sellers get a stage, the city gets trees from the green counter’s takings, and the 11th year of the exercise suggests the formula still draws. The marketplace closes after its second day; the saplings its green stall funds should outlast it by years.
