After having decided to start a brand, there’s this constant pressure to deliver the best that you can. But when you’re a newbie there are a million ways to mess up and a million ways to cover it up as well. Here’s one such story.

The journey of this ensemble began in Rajasthan. We went on a little expedition as usual looking for block printers who were willing to experiment and take risks and basically execute whatever we want. In the process we met multiple groups of highly skilled, experienced artisans. Each of them specialized in different styles ofcourse.

This particular printer worked largely with exports of home linens. We had no clue about this until we stepped into his workshop. So naturally we were a little put off. After seeing their work however, we really wanted to collaborate with them. So we convinced them to hear us out. At the end of this discussion they agreed to print sarees for us but only in bulk. They wanted a minimum order of 25! And here we were trying to provide exclusivity to our future customers. After some contemplation we decided to go ahead with it. We sat for good 3 hours and planned out our sarees and left feeling very excited about what was going to come of it.

Here’s what we imagined it would turn out to be. A bunch of dreamy looking sarees, super light, super comfy, fresh colours. You’d want to wear them every single day. It turned out to be zero percent of what we’d imagined. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating that bit. But we did get a shock of our lives when we saw them first. The white base looked jarring, the layouts were drab, the print was too sparse in the entire length to hold the design together. How did we not see this coming? We couldn’t put out something like that into the market. So after a day of sulking and another day of brainstorming we decided to rip them apart. What you see in that image is the result of that.

This entire ensemble i.e. the tunic and the jacket have come from one saree and maybe a bit of another. The jacket was made of the ‘pallu’ pieces from three sarees, the tunic out of the remaining length of the saree after dyeing it in different shades. The saree got a new life and boy are we glad about it!

We realised that design has to be flexible and defnitely more thorough and we make it a point to follow this now. But little mess ups like these are extremely valuable not just because you learn so much out of them but also because you never know what you might end up with after shedding all the sweat and blood to get back on track. This here happens to be our best selling product so far!