Fifteen years ago a group of women from a small village near Bikaner came to us with a problem

Fifteen years ago a group of women from a small village near Bikaner came to us with a problem.
We listened. And it changed how we make our rugs.

We source our primary wool from – a 13-village region near Bikaner where some of the finest wool in India comes from. The men in those villages rear the sheep. They sell us the yarn.

But the money was not reaching the women or the children.
The village Sarpanch and the women came to us directly.
We thought about what we could do.
And we made one decision.

We moved from machine carding to hand carding and we gave those jobs to the women.

Carding is the process of sorting raw wool before it goes for spinning. Removing impurities. Separating fibres. Machines had always done this.
But machines break the natural fibres in the process.

When the women started hand carding by hand something we did not expect happened. The yarn became more beautiful.

The natural character of wool – its texture, its softness, its capacity for abrash came through in a way that machine carding had always suppressed.

We set up over a hundred bank accounts directly in the women’s names.
Payments went to them.

We helped them understand how to allocate money for their children’s education, for their own needs, independent of anyone else.

What started as the right thing to do became one of the best decisions we ever made for the quality of what we produce.

Today 90 to 95 percent of our production uses hand-carded wool.

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