Weaver
Sri Ramana
Ponduru, Andhra Pradesh
Sri Ramana has been weaving on a pit loom since he was twelve. His father taught him. His father's father taught his father. He is a fourth-generation weaver in Ponduru — a small town in Andhra Pradesh that has been producing some of India's finest handspun khadi for over two centuries.
The khadi in our Cloud Kurta and Overshirt is his work. The slubs you see in the weave — the small irregularities where the thread thickens — are the signature of his hand. No two metres he weaves are exactly alike. We think this is the point.
We visit Ponduru every season. Sri Ramana's rate is set by him, not by us. We pay within two weeks of collection. He has never asked us to change this arrangement. Neither have we.
His cloth is in: Cloud Kurta, The Overshirt, Mandarin Collar Shirt
Tailor
Faroukbhai Shaikh
Dharavi, Mumbai
Faroukbhai has tailored for us since the beginning. He runs a small stitching unit in Dharavi — one of Mumbai's oldest and most skilled garment clusters — where he and his team of four produce every Dravyaa piece that leaves the city.
He has been a tailor for thirty-one years. He learnt from his uncle. His son now works alongside him. There is a precision in how Faroukbhai reads a pattern — a way of holding cloth up to the light before cutting it — that we have not seen in any larger facility.
Every garment is inspected by Faroukbhai before it reaches us. Then we inspect it again. Then someone on the team wears it for a day. If it doesn't pass all three, it doesn't ship.
His stitching is in: All Dravyaa pieces
Dyer
Meenaben Patel
Kutch, Gujarat
Meenaben works with natural dyes — indigo, turmeric, madder, pomegranate rind — in a small dyeing unit outside Bhuj. She is the reason our terracotta pieces are the colour they are: not a synthetic approximation of terracotta, but actual madder-dyed cotton, at exactly the shade the earth yields.
Natural dyes behave differently from synthetic ones. The colour varies slightly between batches — this is why two pieces from the same collection may be fractionally different shades. We consider this a feature and say so on every product page.
Meenaben has been dyeing since she was twenty-two. She trained in Jaipur and moved to Kutch when she married. Her three daughters now help run the unit.
Her dyes are in: Terracotta Kurta, Indigo Overshirt
"The brand is the maker and the customer — we are just the thread between them."
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