The women of Chowk

There is no chikankari factory. The block printer works in a shop, the cutter works in a shop, and then the cloth goes out to homes across Chowk, Daliganj and Thakurganj, where women embroider it in the hours between the rest of their day.

This is the part of the supply chain where the money usually goes missing. Cloth passes through three or four hands between the shop and the frame, and each hand takes a cut of a rate that was low to begin with. An artisan doing forty days of murri work has historically earned less per day than a labourer on a building site.

We buy direct. The rate is agreed before the frame is set up, it is per piece rather than per hour so that careful work is not punished, and it is paid on delivery of the panel rather than on sale of the garment. This is not charity; it is the only way to get the quality we want, because the best artisans have options and will not take rush work at a bad rate.

The consequence for you is that our lead times are honest. When we say eight weeks for a Darbar anarkali, that is eight weeks of one family's work, not an inventory number.