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INTRODUCTION

This is the birth story of N-Crafted from its creators, Nitin Mehta & Lata Mehta! We started this family owned business 39 years ago in the name of Roopkali’z (our parent entity). For nearly 2 decades, we were popular for Indian Sarees collection & in 1995 we pioneered the idea of "Only Kurta – For Women”, which is a rage in the fashion industry in today’s time. Strange as it might sound, we were literally mocked upon by friends in the industry & a few customers too! Sneak-peek into our “Only Kurta” Story: In early 90's, Salwar Kameez started replacing Sarees drastically & unfortunately we could not foresee the impact. With huge stock of sarees & dipped sales we faced several challenges like working capital crunch, delay in vendor payments, salaries, etc. However, ‘necessity is the mother of all innovations' and it proved right for us! To overcome this financial crunch, with heavy hearts, we decided to cut down over thousands of our sarees to create "Only Kurtas" with incredibly unique & unconventional designs. Today we can happily and proudly claim to have innovated & introduced the "Only Kurta" concept to the fashion industry & consumers. We designed, We manufactured & We sold the very first "Only Kurta" ever! Slowly and gradually, but consistently, the consumers started accepting this sustainable-budget-concept of buying "Only Kurtas" (i.e. without bottoms) from us. Customers were able to save on the cost of 4 salwars by using a few common colors like black, blue, red, maroon, green & white for different Kurtas i.e. an average usage ratio of 1 Salwar: 5 Kurtas! Though this might sound very usual in today’s date, back then, in the initial phase even our friends in the industry mocked upon this concept since it was quite unusual and unconventional. However, after nearly 25 years, we all know the vast acceptance of “Only Kurtas” as a new normal for women apparel shopping. “Network Of 400 Artisans” Story: During the summers of the year 1997 the sale of “Only Kurta” was at peak. Back then, average and highest MRP per Kurta was Rs. 50 and Rs. 75 only, respectively. However, alike every business person, with a thought of adding value (and thus increasing the average MRP/Kurta) my wife Shrimati Lata started experimenting her long lost passion & skills by performing hand work on one golden yellow cotton Kurta. Lata, who is a TTF certified thread work artist, knows approximately 200 varieties of handwork and thread work stitches. She played with 3 kinds of stitches– Feather stitch, Mari stitch & Herringbone stitch on this cotton Kurta to create a beautiful motif of blue-green peacock only in a week’s time. And guess what, that Kurta got sold at Rs. 250 the next day itself! And we got our way forward! We started hunting for skilled, needy & specifically women artisans. After almost 10-11 days tour search gave us 3 such artisans Nayanaben, Pravinaben & Jamunaben. They were Skilled, they were Women and they were Needy too! We gave them 3 Kurtas each to design motifs with their hand-work/thread-work skills. They insisted on giving us a bracket of budget to do handwork but my wife Lata motivated them to put in their best art with No-Budget limitations. Since, then it has become our thumb-rule not to compromise on creativity due to budget constraints. Those 3 artisans proved Lata’s gut instinct true and they came back with uniquely handcrafted Kurtas. We priced these 9 Kurtas at Rs. 275 each and those 9 Kurtas got sold rapidly! It elevated our concept of "Only Kurtas" to the next level and we gained confidence in developing an exclusive collection of art & handcrafted Kurtas. Since then there was no looking back! We started creating clusters for women artisans keeping in mind their hand work skill sets, geographic location and availability of transportation. Today, these 3 female artisans are amongst the strong pillars of the foundation of these artisan clusters. As of now, we have a total of 10 clusters across India and each cluster has approximately 40 artisans with 80% female & 20% male ratio. Currently, we have a team of fashion designers working hand in hand with these 400 artisans across India to create a No-Repeat-Design-Collection every day using over 30 varieties of indigenous art forms like thread-work, tribal & regional painting art forms, appliqué work, patchwork, antique coin work, mirror work, to name a few. We continue to innovate each day & in true sense our designs fulfill our motto of 'ONE LADY ONE DESIGN." Today, we try to add and empower more and more female artisans in these clusters. This ensures the well-being of their family, education of their kids, their financial and social development. With this growing team of passionate artisans, we are sure that you will find our collection as a piece of wearable-art and a way to contribute to preserving these art forms and the artisans, at large! Thanks for reading our story so patiently!