Selling beyond Deepavali: a dealer’s calendar to May
Deepavali brings most of the year’s sales, but a shop that plans for Karthigai, weddings and temple festivals sells far longer.
How a box of flower pots is made on our floor
From clay mould to packed case, one flower pot passes through seven pairs of hands in five days. A walk along the line.
Flower pots big are our largest line, and from August one of our sheds makes nothing else. Each pot looks simple, but it passes through seven separate stages before it reaches your godown.
It starts with the shell. Wet clay is pressed into small hollow cones by hand and set out on racks in the sun. In Sivakasi’s dry wind a tray of shells is hard by the next afternoon. Paper and a clay plug for the base are prepared in a separate shed.
The filling is done in small batches in a shed set well apart from the others, by workers who have done this job for years. The composition is weighed out for each tray, never by eye, and poured into the shells through a funnel. Each pot is then tamped down to an even density. That is what gives a flower pot its steady two metres of sparks instead of a short burst.
The pots are sealed, fitted with a fuse and left to dry again. Then they are wrapped in coloured paper, labelled, packed ten to a box and fifty boxes to a case. Before a batch is packed, Murugan, who has run this line since 2004, takes three pots from it to our test ground behind the sheds and times each one. If they are short, the batch is held back and checked. It takes five days from shell to case.
