DELHI : Reinventing time-honoured crafts with contemporary interpretations lies at the core of Sarita Handa, the luxury home design brand. The brand recently collaborated with Swadeshi Silks to unveil the exquisite ‘Swadeshi for Sarita Handa’, a range of furnishing fabrics that, its founder and creative director Sarita Handa, 76, says, “cater to every desire: ornate to subtle, modern to vintage, and calming to cheerful.”
Hers is a storytelling with an innovative blend of different textures, hand embroidery, prints and hues – and it happens to be dominated by whites. “Whites have a silent sophistication. It is a blank canvas that can be juxtaposed with nearly every tint and tone in the colour wheel. White personifies modernity and simplicity,” Handa says.
When Handa started a small venture of linens and fabrics in New Delhi’s Tughlaqabad area in 1992 as a 45-year-old, she never imagined that 30 years later, it would become synonymous with luxury home décor design. She had started her business with Rs 10 lakh (she had plugged in her savings and had taken a bank loan); last year, the company registered an annual turnover of Rs 500 crore.
She now sells her bed and bath linen, furniture, décor products, and furniture fabrics all over India and overseas. Traditional Indian crafts such as zardozi, Kantha, aari, crewel embroidery, sequins, applique work, beadwork, hand quilting and chikan embroidery are a big part of its products.
The beginning
As the wife of an army officer, Handa has lived in multiple cities. She developed a deep appreciation for the country’s diverse textiles, and rich indigenous crafts and techniques. “Collecting saris from different states sowed the seeds of a two-fold vision—a commitment to infuse homes with the rich heritage of Indian textile traditions and simultaneously preserve it.”
Riding on her experience of working for an independent rug designer, she started her enterprise in one of the rooms of her mother’s house in 1992. After a journey filled with relocations, cultural shifts, financial constraints, and the challenging pandemic, Handa says, “crafting a niche presence in the domestic market and gaining global recognition has been more gratifying than the turnovers”.
The expansion story
Though Sarita Handa began as a small line, it first entered the international market (Europe and the US) for craft-centric home furnishings in 1992, the launch year, and ventured into domestic retail a decade later, in 2002. Her secret sauce for survival? “Our aim is to see cultural histories of the globe documented and conserved through our constant endeavours. We survived because of our values, principles, innovation, authenticity, and strong relationships,” says Handa.
The brand supplies major retailers worldwide. It also enjoys a strong presence in India, with three stores in New Delhi, two in Mumbai, and one each in Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. Headquartered in Manesar, the factory is spread across 4,50,000 square feet and has around 12,000 workers. They also have an external support network of 2,500 artisans across India, which syncs with Handa’s creative vision of “providing contemporary interpretations of age-old craft techniques”. In a world driven by equipment and machinery, Sarita Handa is about the nuances of work by hand, a blend of modern designs with old-world elegance, which, according to her, gives her “competitive advantage” over others in the same segment.
New-age touch
Though the firm began with textiles and linen, it has expanded into furniture, accessories and self-care products. Handa credits her older daughter, Suparna, for developing the product portfolio.
Suparna Handa, the managing director at Sarita Handa, is taking forward the 31-year-old business along with her husband, Rahul Puri, executive director of the firm. With a degree in Fashion Business Management from the Fashion Institute of Technology, New York, and stints at Ralph Lauren and ABC carpets – where she developed an understanding of the International luxury lifestyle market – Suparna returned to India and joined her mother in 1994.
“I believe in pushing boundaries and giving traditional techniques a new dimension,” says Suparna. Under her leadership, the company achieved significant milestones, including the first Sarita Handa store in Delhi in 2004 and the launch of the website in May 2020. Other plans include the launch of an international prêt line and collaborations with museums to curate an unforgettable experience of the traditional craft.