Activities in the office in January!

The past few months out office has been a beehive of activity. Between adding new people, new work spaces and bidding farewell to a wonderful consultant, here are all the updates:

Our wonderful MBAs Without Borders consusltant Jessica Custer finished her stay with us, shortly before Christmas. We couldn't believe how quickly the 4 months had passed, and were so impressed by all the work we had done together. With Jessica's assistance we were able to streamline a lot of the workflow in our studio, set up concrete plans for growing towards a fully sustainable wholesale model and efficiently co-ordinate with our weaving co-operatives to ensure their growth. Here are some snaps of our pre-Christmas party before Jessica left.

Cake? Homemade wine? Yes please!

Our team made a handmade towel "bouquet" for Jessica!

We were also hard at work on some exciting new orders of Anthropologie, for this spring. They are one of our favorite teams to work with and we're so excited to hear from the each time! This time around, we're adding some new tags to our products so those of you shopping at their stores can also read a little bit about the products, where they are from and how to use them. Here's a peek at the tags going on the towels:

L-R: Anthropologie home tag, Textile Committee authentication tag, our product-info tag

Some of the fun new colors for Anthropologie, getting prepped..

We also hired some new temporary team members to help us out. These wonderful women live in our neighborhood and we were more than happy to hear about their interest in working with us. To make sure there was enough room for everyone, we decided on a fun way to increase our office space quickly: we got another re-purposed shipping container! If you remember ,we had gotten a re-purposed shipping container as our storage space a few moths ago.

To make things comfortable, this container was outfitted with wooden paneling, windows, doors and fans. Additionally we also built a shed over the two containers to keep them cool in the hot sunny weather we have in Kerala. Take a peek:

The outside of the containers, with the new roof

The container, updated to a workspace, all ready for use!

Our wonderful group of assistants who are tying the tassels & checking the fabrics.

While all this activity was going on in the studio, Indu got a call to speak about our work at the TiECon event being held in Kochi this year. It was a two-day conference where more than 2000 entrepreneurs from various professions gave short talks about creating sustainable business opportunities in Kerala. She was invited to speak in the Women Entrepreneurs segment and to say she knocked it out of the park was an understatement! We're waiting for the official video, meanwhile here's a peek at a hand-held video from an audience member (apologies for the quality, but the content is well worth it!)

Indu presenting our work at Kara at the TiECon event in Kochi, December 2013

Well, that's all for this month's updates. Watch this space for more :)

xoxo, Chitra