Summer 2012 Updates

• Our first ever Free product giveaway (yes, its all free!) contest on Facebook has just started! All you have to do is upload a favorite summer picnic photo to win free fabrics! More details here.

• Indu was interviewed by the Women's Web Magazine, here's the read.

• Unbelievably successful Annual Clearance Sale of our previous collections. It ends on August 15 2012, so you've still got a few days to get the best deals!

• Guest blogging at Yours Sustainably, thanks Jessica!

• Our fabrics are now available at the Good Earth stores in India and Terrain (Anthropologie's sister concern) in the United States.

• We worked with Wendell Rodricks to create this custom threaded shawl based on his design. So pumped to see it on the runway at the Lakme India Fashion Week in Mumbai this past week!

• Our Fair Trade certification process made some headway as we were visited by the Fair Trade Forum India's team to verify details of our team and collaborators (including the weaving co-operatives). As we hope to hear back from them, we're keeping our fingers crossed for the green signal :)

• We experimented with some thicker weave techniques, with some lovely results.

• Sarah Lin of Ellie Fun Day visited our studio and wrote up a sweet article on her blog with some nice photos!

•  Lakshmi Rammohan, the director of Dreamweaver Weddings commissioned us to create some custom giveaways and bride+groom sets for some upcoming events for Fall 2012. This is still in underway, but we're so excited to work with this incredibly talented event manager!

Handmade drawings

A bit of a flashback: after Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge wrote about our work in July 2008, things at our small home-office in Kerala got pretty hectic, as I mentioned in my previous post. It was in this crazy moment that I felt like we needed a unique way to thank those first few shoppers who placed orders with us.

I started sketching some handmade thank-you cards to add to the first shipments that left our office. It was so much fun making them that it quickly turned into an obsession: before long we had sent out over a hundred cards! Basically it turned into a side-project where I tried to find as many ways to illustrate the words "Thank You"; above and below are a few:

 

Meeting The World: Online

The first test of our branding strategy came about on the morning of August 2008, when Indu casually logged in to look at our email. Our e-commerce site had launched a few weeks ago and so far, the site had floated along in relative internet obscurity. All of a sudden that morning, the inbox was almost at maximum capacity with orders from new clients, pouring in by the minute! In a few days we cleared our first stock of fabrics and soon our site boasted the banner: Sold Out! How this this happen?

Designing the identity

As we started discussing the idea of setting up Kara Weaves, back in 2005 and 2006, we often went back to the reasons why this fabric was little known outside Kerala. It had nothing to do with the quality of the weave or the softness of the texture or the strength and durability, all of which it had. It came down to how people perceived the fabric: as dowdy, old-fashioned, dysfunctional, with lackluster colors and patterns. 
One of the basic premises of graphic design is to work with altering a sense of perception in the viewer/consumer. I was using this theory ad infinitum as I worked for a high-end branding agency in New Delhi, making it work its magic for clients in real estate, fashion, restaurants, storefronts and more. As we pondered this question in handloom, I decided that was precisely what we needed: some smart branding.