Alice and Robbie met Atal, Abhay's father, on their second trip to India together in 2012. This was when Alice still had her brand Syndicut and he worked on pieces for them. Abhay then returned from university and took over the family business. It is a small family run print and production house within the old city walls of Jaipur, Northern India which Abhay's grandfather started 40 years ago. They have a team of about 80 people that includes tailors, seamstresses, block printers and screen printers and a small room of women who work on embellishment. Many of their team have been there since Abhay was a boy, it is clean and safe and is a nice environment to work in. Abhay and his family run a good, honest business and we have now worked with him for almost 12 years.
Abhay inspecting his team's work.
The team screenprinting one of our prints, an incredible thing to witness your prints coming to life like this.
Rakesh runs our second production team, also in Jaipur, and usually makes any part of the collection that isn't screen printed. We met Rakesh through one of our printers as this is his expertise. All the natural dying and digital printing is managed by Rakesh, who is a lovely man who works with his cousin and uncle, he has lots of makers at his finger tips and anything is possible, well he tries very hard to make anything possible!
Alice & Robbie catching up with Rakesh over lunch.
Our rugs are made by two brothers and their teams about an hour outside Jaipur in the countryside who are working hard to keep these old weaving traditions alive. The rugs are woven around the villages on very basic homemade wooden looms. It's amazing how spectacular the final product is using such simple processes to make them. They take care of the workforce very well with health plans and housing. The main building where they work is absolutely beautiful in a very green garden just in the hills.
Meeting the team that create our rugs.
Our rugs coming to life, showing our 'Green Grass' rug being woven, which can be purchased from our website.
And we have just started working with a new team lead by Avishek, we are looking to use a full range of sustainable fabrics, whilst exploring new materials. Going back to the recycled fabrics we used a few years ago. Avishek is very on it with three stages of quality control as things are being made, so we are hoping this will improve the quality and increase the life span of our garments.
