Taniya: Then some are nursing-friendly because I was breastfeeding my baby during this phase so we wanted to include that too for some of our tops. All our stuff have pockets, which is so important now to keep masks, sanitisers… Kaftans, spaghetti tops, long pants, besides nightwear too. Like kurta tops which one could wear with jeans and step out. Sujata: We made something which was not just comfortable to wear at home for all the virtual meetings but also to step out in. We were initially thinking of making blouses out of it but then we focused on comfort wear just how we had started Suta, with comfortable pants and dresses. This is the first time we didn’t design and we used the fabric as it is because we were trying to help people. That was very sad and hence we brought a lot of inventory which were lying with them and that fabric is the focus of this collection. We were getting a lot of calls that some of these weavers have piles of fabrics but no one to buy as most stores were shut. So we decided to cut the salary of some of the employees to get more weavers. See, the major problem with a company like us is the supply, and here we had many weavers who didn’t have work. And we grew three times from last year to this year financially, this happened because we were trying to help the weavers. Last year during Covid-19 there was such terrible condition in India that most of the weavers were not able to get food. You have recently launched the loungewear collection. That aside of course there are things like cyclones, flooding which hampers the work, but those are something we can’t do anything about it. Low, I would say, is when people are sabotaging and then trolls, because they very hurtful. Since the last four-five months we dedicate to one NGO, which is a big high for us. To us it doesn’t feel like five years! When we visit the villages and the weavers say they bought a bike with the Suta money is when we feel proud and get goosebump moments. When you look back what would you say has been the biggest highs and lows? Now we have 100-plus employees and 14,000 weavers and craftsmen. Sujata: Yes, when we started we had a total of five people… two of us, two weavers and another employee. We started with two weavers, now we have around 14,000 weavers and craftsmen. So Taniya and I thought if we take 10 weavers on board we will promise them 365 days of work…. Also when we were in corporate we would be thinking that are we impacting anyone, that led us to think about the weavers who have no constant supply of work. Although we started with dresses as well but sari took centre stage. We wanted people to start wearing saris again, especially youngsters because if you start at a young age you will love it even more. So when we were doing corporate jobs, we often had colleagues who would ask, “How do you wear a sari?” “ Koi occasion hai kya that you are wearing sari?”, “Where will we get good tailor, petticoat, blouse?”…so these got us thinking and we wanted to solve these issues. While growing up we used to go to our dida’s house where we would see washed saris hanging for drying, the beautiful smell, then we would see mom and aunts wear saris regularly, so beautifully and in a prim and proper way….
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