History of the company
More than pareos ,
an art of living
The Batik Store doesn’t just make you elegant, colourful and trendy pareos. Our aim is to bring art to beaches the world over! To let the world benefit from its thousand and one colours, its history, its customs and symbols that are still little known.
As with all good stories, ours began with a meeting.
The birth of
The Batik Store
In 1995, Stefan, originally from Berlin, met Isabelle during one of his trips to France.
Realising that they were made for each other, they decided to travel together to South-West Asia in search of handicrafts to sell at summer markets in France.
In Thailand, they visited various craft markets and spotted some beautiful traditional Batik creations from Indonesia.
Fascinated, they headed to Bali the very next day for a few weeks of island hopping across Indonesia. It was in central Java, in a small town called Solo, that they discovered the world centre of Batik.
By working with local factories and ordering designs from their catalogues, they gradually discovered the know-how of Batik and saw the potential of this technique. The result was a fusion between the ancestral skills of Javanese Batik and Western aesthetics: they developed their own designs, more modern and adapted to Western tastes.
A second meeting
As fate would have it, it was at this very moment that they met Sutarto, a poor family man but highly talented and experienced in the craft of Batik.
Despite their cultural differences, an alchemy developed and, over and above their extraordinary artistic complicity, a lasting friendship was born, enabling the 2 families to prosper together and live off their passion to this day.
In 1995, they built their own factory in Solo, central Java.
Art and Batik?
With a lifelong passion for colour manipulation and contemporary art, they’ve revolutionised the sarong into an artistic creation in its own right, aiming to transcend the simple beach accessory and become a veritable walking painting with its own place in the world of fashion.
And what about today?
For almost 30 years, having passionately cultivated the desire for progressive creative evolution, we have created one of the largest collections of modern Batik.
Comprising a wide variety of original creations, from figurative, abstract, tribal and futuristic motifs to free adaptations of works by great contemporary painters, our Batiks are recognisable by their quality and originality.
The desire to go even further has never been greater than it is today!
