La Phu sweater village

La Phu was a leading village in commune, belonging to Hoai Duc district, Ha Tay province which was we known in capital city about their top weaving products to offer to King. Nowadays, La Phu is one of the richest handicraft village with woolen weaving for export. La Phu people has created their own marvelous history...
Along the concrete road straight to village, tourists can not imagine that they are in a rural area because the mark of home village has been replaced by the road filled with colorful woolen alongside that make La Phu becoming a huge weaving factory. La Phu people recalled about the difficult time of chiffon weaving when there was no consumable market. To survive, La Phu people had to shift to different trades in agriculture leisure time such as making soft noodles, barley sugar, candy, alcohol, starch,… and La Phu people is always bring into play their creativeness & intelligent, for example when all people only know making barley sugar by rice shoot and steamed glutinous rice, La Phu people created the barley sugar by rice shoot and tapioca that make delicious taste and cheaper price. In the beginning of 1990s, after the chaotic events, Russia and Eastern market became gradually stable, La Phu villagers noticed the opportunities to develop their traditional weaving by using woolen instead of chiffon, their products consisted 5 main categories: trousers, shirts, hats, socks, & scarf. In the past, the production scale was small and limited in single household. Nowadays, different production types were established such as enterprise, cooperative, groups, household,…who play important role as material supply, products purchase, supporting villagers to buy production tools & equipments. To make a complete production line, some production units imported equipments to make auxiliary components such as elastic band, padlock, labels & packaging machines. Up to now, La Phu has 1,830 households in which 95% are making woolen weaving. There are twenty enterprises and hundreds of cooperatives, production groups in the commune in which big enterprises such as Minh Phuong, Dong Do, Vinh Thinh. There are about 8,000 woolen weaving machines, nearly 500 socks auto weaving machines and many modern equipments such as computerized weaving & embroidered machines which produce hundred million woolen products of different types, more than 4 million meters of fabric and thousand tones of elastic band, and packaging. There are more and more production units are willing invest and upgrade the production technology in order to bring La Phu’s products to foreign markets such as Russia, France, Italy, Japan America…. with annual production value of more than VND 300 billion. La Phu woolen weaving association was formed; quality barcode, trade marks, symbol are on process in order to confirm the prestige of La Phu products in market. Industry Zone will be built soon in La Phu in order to support enterprises in production extension which open a promising future for villagers in proactive La Phu village.