if handmade is the new luxury, when will the hands behind it get their due?
the story behind why we chose to learn the craft ourselves, and why ranvek is an artist-led studio.
ranvek wasn't born out of an idea alone. There were years of thought, research, conversations and questions that went into deciding what we wanted to build. And, in many ways, the story began long before ranvek even existed.
growing up around embroidery.
Having grown up in Lucknow, one of India's most recognisable centres for hand embroidery, the craft was always around us.
Many of the didis who worked in and around our homes were also chikankari artisans. After a day's work, they would return home and spend hours embroidering pieces to earn a little extra. Some days, our caretaker help would sit at our home, working on a piece while keeping an eye on us.
We grew up seeing this as an ordinary part of life. We didn't yet understand the larger system behind it, the economics of the craft or the distance between the person making a piece and the value it eventually held.
But we were also fortunate to have seen another side of embroidery, one much closer to home.
Both our nani and dadi (grandmothers) were exceptionally skilled at the craft too. We remember the neatness of their stitches, the patience with which they worked and the care they put into pieces they were making for themselves and their families.
There was no hurry to finish a piece by a deadline. No pressure to move on to the next one. Just the little satisfaction of making something well.
We had grown up seeing the same craft in two very different circumstances: as a source of additional income, often fitted into an already demanding day, and as something made with time, freedom and personal pride.
This isn't to say that one was more talented than the other. Quite the opposite. The skill was always there....what differed was the time, the circumstances and the value that making the piece held for the person doing it.
And that stayed with us.
what we saw when we began researching ranvek.
When we started seriously exploring the idea of ranvek, we didn't want to build a brand on assumptions. We wanted to understand the craft, the market and the people who made it possible. So we spent time researching, conducting surveys, travelling around Lucknow and visiting chikankari clusters and addas - the spaces where embroidery is worked on, often collectively.
We came back from many of those visits feeling heavy.
It was difficult to reconcile the beauty of the finished pieces with the conditions in which we had seen some of the work being done. It made us question the distance between the value a finished piece commands and the compensation received by the person whose hours of labour helped create it.
We know that the realities of the craft vary from person to person, and that not every working arrangement is the same. We also know that fair compensation is only one part of a much larger conversation about working conditions, time, skill and dignity.
But we couldn't stop asking ourselves a question.
How do we celebrate a piece for the love and care it brings into someone's home without also thinking about the circumstances in which it was made?
A person might spend hundreds of hours creating something that will eventually be displayed in a beautiful home, purchased as a luxury object or treasured for generations. Yet how much of that final value actually reaches the hands that made it?
We don't believe there is one simple answer. But we do believe the question deserves to be asked.
when did handmade become a luxury?
Today, handmade is often used to communicate exclusivity, craftsmanship and value. Brands proudly talk about the hundreds of hours that go into making a piece, and rightly so. Handwork takes time, skill, patience and years of practice. But whenever we read about the number of hours invested in a piece, we find ourselves wondering: whose hours are we talking about? And what do those hours mean to the person who spent them?
If a piece is valued because it took hundreds of hours to make, shouldn't the people who spent those hours be an important part of that value?
We aren't against brands that work with artisans. We also aren't suggesting that working with skilled craftspeople is inherently wrong, or that every brand operates in the same way. There are people and businesses working hard to preserve traditional crafts and build more equitable relationships with the people who practise them.
We believe that kind of work matters enormously.
But when we looked at the possibilities for ranvek, we had to ask ourselves a more personal question.
Did we want to build a brand around work done by other hands, or did we want to learn the craft, understand it from the inside and take responsibility for making the work ourselves?
For us, the answer became clear.
why we chose to be an artist-led studio.
Both of us come from design backgrounds. We had spent years learning to think about form, composition, colour, materials and the relationship between an object and the space it occupies. We wanted to bring that way of thinking to traditional embroidery. But we didn't want to simply design something and hand it over to someone else to execute.
We wanted to understand the craft ourselves.
We wanted to know what it meant to translate a drawing into stitches, how thread behaved, how a composition changed when worked by hand and how much time and patience went into achieving the finish we envisioned.
So we learnt, practised, made mistakes and kept going.
That is how ranvek became an artist-led studio. We design and make our pieces ourselves, bringing together our backgrounds in architecture, fashion and textiles with a craft that has been part of our lives for as long as we can remember.
It also means accepting our own limitations. We cannot make everything, take on every commission or produce work at the pace of a conventional production setup. We choose to work on a limited number of pieces, prioritising the quality of the work and the time each piece needs.
For us, this is not about claiming that making everything ourselves makes us better than anyone else. It is about choosing a model that feels honest to the kind of studio we want to build.
and when we do need another pair of hands?
We don't believe that doing everything ourselves is the only way to respect a craft. Nor do we believe that every studio must operate the way we do. Sometimes, we bring in an artist we know and trust to help with particular parts of the work. When we do, we consciously pay her way above the prevailing local rate for that work, equal to the compensation we grant ourselves.
It is a small part of our practice, but an important one. And a lot of the times our mom (THE Ranjeeta Batra) helps us out too!
We want the people who contribute to ranvek's work to feel that their time and skill matter. And if the studio grows to a point where we need more hands, we want to grow in a way that gives those people the importance, recognition and fair compensation they deserve.
We don't have every answer about how to build a perfectly equitable craft business. We are still learning, just as we are still learning the craft itself.
But we know the principles we want to hold on to.
Limited pieces. Thoughtful commissions. Quality without compromise. And growth that doesn't come at the expense of the people who make the work possible.
this is what handmade means to us.
We know that the word handmade can carry a great deal of value. We see that value in our own work, in the work of our grandmothers and in the generations of craftspeople who have kept traditional embroidery alive.
We want to celebrate that skill. We want to preserve the techniques, explore new possibilities and create work that allows traditional embroidery to find a place in contemporary spaces. But we also want to remember what we saw growing up in Lucknow, what we learnt from our grandparents and what stayed with us after visiting the places where this craft is practised.
The value of a handmade piece cannot be understood by looking at the finished object alone.
It also lives in the knowledge, time, skill and care that went into making it - and in whether the people who contributed to it were valued fairly.
We are not here to tell other brands how they must work. We can only tell you why we chose to work this way.
ranvek is our attempt to bring together the craft we grew up around, the design we have learnt and the values we want our work to stand for.
And to everyone who makes, sells, collects or loves Indian handmade work, we leave you with one question:
if handmade is the new luxury, when will the hands behind the handmade get their due in luxury?
-- Saumya and Bhavya | founders, ranvek
Beautifully written, every brand has their own way and ranvek way is 💯