About INKRITI
We are bridging the gap between you and thousands of skilled artisans across India.
#ConciouslyCrafted unisex pieces co-designed with love
Inspired by The Indian Way of Sustainable Thinking, INKRITI aims to promote awareness and share experiences about handloom, handicrafts, community, and culture to make these age-old crafts accessible to people from all walks of life. It was this belief that led to the creation of Inkriti. The plan is to contemporize these crafts so they find a place in everyone’s hearts and homes.
The co-founders, an accountant and a designer, from completely different walks of life, on a chance meeting bonded over their passion for traditionally handcrafted textiles and the rich culture associated with them.
Sonu and Matrika observed despite technological advancements, the crafts industry lacks recognition, it has not received the recognition it deserves. They also noted a lack of accessibility and holistic representation for these crafts. If you are one who is passionate about fashion, art, heritage, artisan crafts, and textiles, join us at INKRITI to make a #ConciouslyCrafted world.
Inkriti’s vision
- To create global awareness around textile crafts & fabricsÂ
- Building a lifestyle brand by making rich Indian textile crafts accessible to everybody
Inkriti’s Mission
- Identifying Indian crafts, meeting traditional artisans on the field to create awareness;Â
- Creating ways/ mediums through innovation and research to incorporate these crafts in everyday life via clothing, accessories, interior products, DIY kits, gifting items, and many more.
Our Pillars
How does Inkriti work
At Inkriti, we explore India’s regions to identify rich crafts. Through research and fieldwork, we connect with artisans to understand the history, process, and importance of their craft. We dig for you the untold, hidden gems of authentic and insightful stories. You can enjoy, learn from, and share them through blogs, social media, videos, and products.
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In order to innovate while retaining the true heritage of the craft, we partner with artisans within the craft and community. Together, we explore and experiment to co-create designs and fabrics that are contemporary yet hold the true essence of the craft without any compromise.
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Our entire process empowers about 25 artisans who are involved in various steps of the respective crafts. We aim to impact more and more artisans’ lives as we grow in this journey. Each craft has a history associated with it and each artisanal product is as much unique for its authenticity and finesse as it is special for the story of people who overcame a million odds to still preserve our heritage craft.
HOW IT ALL STARTED​
Good things happen unexpectedly. This time it happened when the duo met and shared their deep passion and love towards the rich Indian culture and its traditional heritage textile crafts.
Sonu was attending a business meetup in Kolkata in 2021 when she came across a gentleman. As she spoke about her plans to explore something in the craft industry, this gentleman lit up and shared Matrika’s contact details with her, who according to him was then studying textiles and was a lot into crafts and wanted to do something big around them just like Sonu. The gentleman was Matrika’s father.
Without any ado, Sonu called up Matrika immediately after the event and unlike end-of-year plans to Goa where overplanning happens more than the plans seeing the light of day, they actually met the very next day in a cafe in Kolkata. They spoke their hearts out about their love for Indian crafts and how the industry is today and how much more can be done. The discussion however just remained up in the air for the next couple of months as Sonu got back to her Fintech job at a renowned startup in Bengaluru and Matrika took up Masters in Textile at the Royal College of Arts in London.
Magic happened in June ’22 when they both connected once again (destiny!), spoke for hours on a call and stepped into their eureka moment to fulfil their shared dream. They both identified and acknowledged a big gap which existed in the Indian handicraft industry- a lack of awareness and accessibility around traditional Indian textile crafts globally.
Driven by the idea of gaining the much-deserved glory for textile crafts the duo decided to do something around it. They did their first-ever field visit together the very next month in July ’22 and met artisans in Gujarat, the city of Legends and Lions. The visit gave birth to a more concrete idea which took the form of a full-blown venture- Inkriti. Soon after, Sonu quit her well-paying corporate job and Matrika finished her Masters and now they both are fully immersed in making this idea a reality because this time the idea is meant to ‘land’ and not just stay ‘up in the air’.
Meet the Founders
Sonu Jain, Co-founder
Born and brought up in a Jain family in Kolkata, Sonu is a Chartered Accountant (CA) by qualification. She has corporate experience of about 7 years in MNCs like Infosys and Fintech startups largely based out of India’s Silicon Valley, Bangalore. While she loves crunching numbers, she finds peace in paintings and crafts. She narrates that while growing up she would often sit by her mom & watch her delve into embroidery & stitching work which her mum loved doing in her free time. That’s how & why she says that she’s always had a special place in her heart for handmade products. For Sonu, Inkriti is a dream idea that she’s really passionate about. Through Inkriti she wants to empower the craftsmen who deserve due credit for their extraordinary skills by enabling every’body’ to experience the Indian textile crafts.
Matrika Bhandari, Co-founder
Matrika is a design researcher based in London, New Delhi and Kolkata. Design has a way of being impersonally personal. Coming from a commercial textile background, ‘design’ was industry and trend-driven, focused on what the market wanted. At the same time working with traditional craft practices led to discovering the importance of connection and people through design and textiles. This led to two distinct viewpoints that played key roles in her work as a designer and as a researcher. She has worked with multidisciplinary design and textile studios. She engaged in different parts of the research and design development processes, using design strategies to create new systems. Her journey at Royal College of Art began with understanding sustainability through various dimensions, it evolved into investigating how it is linked to the social responsibility of creativity and the ethical impact of design.
