2. The Christmas decorations in the South: reviving crafts through export value chains.
In the 1980's Firozabad, a glass production cluster situated in North India, starts preoducing and exporting Christmas decorations. Indeed, Christmas decorations in brass were already exported by the neighboring metal cluster, Moradabad. Moradabad's exporters started around 1985 to ask for glass christmas balls to manufacturers in Firozabad. They lent their own brass models to their glass partners.
Firozabad was already producing tableware glass for the Indian market, it was, not difficult to adapt the techniques to the Christmas goods productions. The customers in Europe and the U.S started to send their own designs. In the 1990's, this industry boomed with the liberalization of India, and nowadays, Firozabad exports all kinds of decorative items, and the export glass makers did prestigious colaborations, for example with the contemporary artist Jean-Michel Othoniel, who is now exhibiting the glassworks made in Firozabad in the Petit palais, Paris.
