|
|
|
The Fabric Behind Suutra
|
|
Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar
|
|
February, 06 2008
|
|
|
|
|
Avni Jamdar was working as a research associate at Oakland-based non-profit PolicyLink back in 2003. It was the sort of job many would admire, and some would envy. But a trip to her native India in 2003 made her realize that an enviable job wasn't enough.
Avni’s family lives in the state of Gujarat, a state that had been hit hard by an earthquake in 2001. Images of the destruction stayed with Avni, and left her with a sense that she had to do something. When she visited Gujarat two years later, she figured out what that something was. |
Mona Shah (left) and Avni Jamdar show off Suutra's creations
Avni Jamdar was working as a research associate at Oakland-based non-profit PolicyLink back in 2003. It was the sort of job many would admire, and some envy. But a trip to her native India in 2003 made her realize that an enviable job wasn't enough.
Avni’s family lives in the state of Gujarat, which had been hit hard by an earthquake in 2001. Images of the destruction stayed with Avni, and left her with a sense that she had to do something. When she visited Gujarat two years later, she figured out what that something was.
Fast forward to today. Avni, along with her business partner Mona Shah, runs Suutra, a fashion house that sells beautiful -- if slightly expensive -- clothes through retailers across the country. The clothes are made by women in Gujarat. Suutra's world headquarters isMona’s home in Oakland.
What makes this fashion house stand apart from others is that it gets its clothes made in India. But no, wipe those sweatshop images from your mind. Suutra, (which means both thread and story in Hindi) collaborates with a group called Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), which works with low-income women across India to help them become self-employed.
In Gujarat -- and this is where Avni comes in -- the group supplies employees with organic fabrics. SEWA trains these women to embroider and stitch. The result – stylish, beautiful clothes that can be found in chic boutiques here, thanks to Suutra, who sells them in the U.S. for SEWA. In turn, SEWA sends fair wages back to the creators. These are 30 percent more than what these women would command in an open market, and can amount to up to $8 a day. That might not sound like much here, but in a small Gujarati village, it's substantial.
Thirty-one year old Avni is a trained architect and urban planner. It is her designs that these seamstresses embroider and stitch. She goes to India once a year to work with the women in the villages—and she gets to see first hand how she is changing their lives.
Through Suutra, she wants to provide women artisans in India and other developing countries not just with fair wages, but she wants to help them “live with art,” she says. “I want to help preserve art forms that were passed down with no commercial value.”
Photos: Dwayne Marsh
You can see the art forms in the many types of intricate embroidery in Suutra’s clothes.
The seed of this collaboration was planted in 2003, when Avni met with some of SEWA's staff, who were desperately trying to figure out a strategy to help earthquake-hit regions. The group had asked the women it worked with to create swatches of any kind they could, and then bought them - regardless of design and quality. “They filled warehouses with ugly stuff,” recalls Avni. “They realized they needed another strategy.”
Anvi saw that the women’s skills would find an appreciative audience in the west. She developed her idea into a social enterprise at Stanford’s Executive Program in Social Entrepreneurship. And got Suutra off the ground.
Last year, she brought in Mona, her husband's friend, as a business partner to expand Suutra's sales and marketing. Mona hopes and believes that as Suutra grows, it will be the first stitch in creating a social fabric that unravels the sweatshop industry.
And they may be onto something here. They sell not just through direct trunk shows, and at events like feria urbana, but they've made their way into 13 eco-boutiques all over the country, stretching from Manhattan to Chicago to Los Angeles to the Bay Area.
For more on Suutra, go to http://suutra.com |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
RECOMMEND
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|