It was in March, 2020 that I traveled to Jaipur to embark on my entrepreneurial journey. That was the first time I took the baby step to create a capsule collection for my favourite home decor segment, Rugs. My list of vendors was ready and so we headed straight out to visit those who already had full-fledged manufacturing units. I totally went berserk over the wide array of colours and textures. It was very hard to contain my excitement so I decided to carry a few samples back home. I bought them with the intention of selling, albeit one or two pieces I chose as keepsakes. Besides, who can dare come back empty-handed post visit to a textile-haven like that? 🙂
I curated & collected a couple of designs across various sizes and materials for my understanding. But as the saying goes, life happens when you are busy planning life. While I was busy with that, the onset of Covid set in and so many of my other plans went awry. However, we were at least fortunate enough to be home before the lockdown. Before I dived deep into this, I wanted to test a small batch for this segment. And so given the situation, I decided to keep the sale with the few exclusive pieces that I had freshly bought. Lo and behold, nearly all my pieces found their new homes in no time. Spent the rest of 2020 being at home watching “How to…” videos on YT and packing orders.
Once again in 2021, during my trip to the mountains, I had a small successful stint of helping a local weaver in Banjar District, Tirthan Valley at Himachal sell his handmade shawls through Instagram which led to a whopping sale of 20K overnight. That joy to assist him and also the pleasure of giving was the moment that renewed my spirit and made me determined to work closely with an artisan or a weaver to bring to life a collection of rugs that I can design and execute from scratch. I foresaw a bigger collection created with the help of a weaver who would be a master at his craft, with the kind of skills that are passed across generations within their communities and hoped to put into motion soon.
Cut to 2022, things had just started picking up pace right after the second wave of the pandemic. Due to the virtue of social media, my weaver Zahid Bhai’scontact fell right into my lap. What started with long discussions on calls, eventually it ended with a long distance coordination on the design’s make i.e how easy or difficult, scale and size, pantone colours, look and feel for the entire collection. Indeed, it was a complete stroke of luck and a giant leap of faith.
These dhurrie rugs have definitely been my passion project and my affinity towards working with local artisans has only been re-affirmed. Last but not the least, the collection has been developed by Mr. Zahid Ansari who belongs to the craft cluster group and an age-old weaving community at Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh in India.
My main moments from anxiety to ecstasy 🙂
1. This was quite a big investment (#punintended) and so I was obviously sitting on the fence for the longest time. The shipments arrived in huge gigantic sized rolls in synthetic woven sacks, making my living room look like a small godown in no time. And then there were elephant sized butterflies in my tummy all the time thinking, ‘Will my designs look good and be liked? Will people in India be looking out to buy one?’.
2. Identifying and meticulously choosing pantones and sharing colour swatches on Whatsapp only to anxiously wait to see them in real dyes and figure out if the right colour was chosen was quite nail-biting 🙂
3. That day when you await the entire shipment, and the thrill of removing and seeing the pieces for the first time yourself is a delight 🙂
4. That time when somebody places an order at the same time as you put it out for preview is even more exhilarating! 🙂
5. I have also learnt I don’t really have good rapport with numbers so, henceforth, my commercials are going to be handled by somebody wiser.
6. While I was judging and fretting over everything, my rugs reached places like LA and HK that were far beyond what I had imagined. The key is to simply start, trust the process & believing in yourself no matter what 🙂
