Lotus Veda is all about handmade fabrics, home textiles and sustainable clothing. The brand focuses on textile development and believes in story-telling through colours and designs which is an amalgamation of traditional and modern sensibility. Lotus Veda is all about ‘Simple is the Most Beautiful & Most Luxurious’. Handcrafted textiles, natural dyes and fine prints are what the brand loves and covets.
The process centres on working closely with master weavers and artisans, across various parts of India. Every fabric it does is a showcase of Indian culture. The team of the brand is 100 per cent dedicated to supporting slow and sustainable growth; creating a sensitive awareness about handloom and hand-printed textile’s potential; and continuing to build a bright future for its weavers and artisans by unlocking the enormous prospect in both local and global markets.
Brand with a difference
The journey of Lotus Veda started in 2016 with a dream to create fashion with more respect and dignity; connecting the people with their work and making them one; reassuring the artisans and the weavers that the work they are doing is still relevant and will always be relevant and will be cherished across generations all over the world. Chetan Daruka, Founder of Lotus Veda when talking about the inception story mentioned, “It was always an inspiration to be working around handcrafted textiles, to be pulled towards real craft, real people and real work despite all the temptations of the commercial world.”
He then went on to state, “Finding inspiration in my father’s textiles shop, knowledge and interest in Indian textiles started growing eventually. I knew that my brand’s identity lay in my own roots. I travelled to clusters such as Chanderi, Maheshwar, Varanasi, Kachchh, Murshidabad in West Bengal, Bhagalpur in Bihar, weavers in South India, which formed important experience for me to understand their textile vocabulary hence leaving me fascinated and curious for more.”
With no formal education in textile and fashion design, and just sheer curiosity to explore the folds of textiles from across regions and alleys of India, he started interacting with weavers and artisans and left no opportunity to spend time with them and see them working with beautiful textiles and techniques. This is how he learned the craft. After being a learner for almost 10 years and still being a learner, he started Lotus Veda in 2010 to bring the beautiful handmade textiles of India together.
Building a label
The journey to build a label has been at times exhausting, tiring and challenging but always made the team happy and positive, Chetan admits. “The more we travelled across the country, the more we fell in love with the local people and their beautiful work. It became very important for us to showcase Indian art in its true form with global design sense and perspective. Lotus Veda is all about handmade fabrics, home textiles and sustainable clothing. The brand focuses on textile development and takes great pride in marrying traditional and modern sensibilities while upholding the highest ethical and environmental standards.”
The unique aspect of the brand is that it mixes yarns to create new textures for new textiles that symbolise unity in the diversity of Indian crafts. It carries signature yarns of one region to another region and mixes them with their local yarns to create new textures and fabrics. Similarly, it hand prints or processes different fabrics in different local techniques. It’s like concocting what the brand loves to call as ‘textile recipes’. “Since we were mixing yarns and techniques to develop fabrics, we decided to mix fabrics from across regions to craft our garments. Hence in any of our collections, it’s not just one fabric, technique or region that creates a new narrative, rather it’s a combination of these that come together as a single collection,” Chetan highlights.
Lotus Veda as a brand is more about story-telling and reflects the journey of many processes. Textiles are steeped in culture, history and tradition from across India.
With a love for traditional art and culture, Lotus Veda has engaged itself closely with the master artisans from Kutch, Banaras, Rajasthan, Bihar, West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat. Its journey is a collective narrative of all the makers whose shared efforts culminate in a beautiful legacy. While making and designing beautiful textiles, the team spent a lot of time with artisans and weavers from across regions, which is where they learned the techniques of the craft.
Developing textiles
The most unique aspect of the brand is that it is not only creating styles using fabric, but is also curating and creating textiles. So, it is like a blank canvas and Chetan and his undying team efforts are always towards perfecting the textile canvas with artistic showcases.
When asked how the brand sets itself apart from the contemporaries, he says, “The textiles we develop at Lotus Veda are an expression of the diverse Indian culture through colours, designs and craftsmanship. It is with great pleasure that we work with handloom and handcrafted textiles in many parts of India. It allows for innovation and experimentation on a very intuitive and personal level. Each piece is handmade by expert artisans from across regions and is dedicated to preserving and nurturing age-old techniques and heritage. With an unbounded love for Indian art and culture, our approach to our work is not only to unceasingly sustain and revive the traditional crafts but at the same time also blend the opposite ends of vintage and modern. Our endeavour is to make a product that connects with people.”
It was not only a journey of the brand and the way it evolved during the making but also about people who were fortunate enough to travel learn, stay and evolve with it. “The people we met in this process taught us the real passion, the love for their work, respect and pride for their history and attachment to their locals. We never felt so rooted and connected the way we feel when we work and stay with them. We have always believed in mindful production and selling and we have limited collections launched with a small number of inventories to offer. We have always believed that rather than discarding the old clothes, we need to put value to them and treat them as a treasure. This is where we believe in seasonless collections and all our silhouettes and the fabric used are inspired to be classic and can be worn at any time of our lives,” Chetan adds.
Customer Response
The response of the craft has always been overwhelming. When the brand decided to start the clothing collection, the struggle was what is that it can offer, which will add value to the consumer and their daily life and at the same time can be easy, comfortable, minimal, timeless, environmental-supportive yet friendly. Lotus Veda wanted people to buy less and be more conscious of what they were buying. The motive was to provide something that you would treasure and cherish forever. After all, the brand admits that the apparel of the future should be ‘less is more’. The beauty of slowing down, being conscious, to be with the nature, to need less and to treasure more.
Celebrities that enjoy craftsmanship, slow living, sustainable and textile clothing are always favourable towards the brand. The brand loves dressing them up and seeing them wear a unique piece from the brand. It is important for the brand that the clothes are seen by the right audience, as the aesthetics need to resonate with each other. Few of the names that have worn Lotus Veda are Kajal Agarwal, Karishma Kapoor, Vidya Balan, Ashwini Iyer, etc.
Eyeing the future
It is never easy at first to explain people the need of shift towards conscious clothing and lifestyle. “We think a Lotus Veda customer is someone who believes in conscious designs that are timeless and classic, promotes the value of handmade and skilled craftsmanship. One who would prefer comfort over trends, let it be everyday ordinary and lives through individual expressions and celebrates small luxuries. The pandemic had brought the world to a halt and has made us realise that there is a much larger world which is wanting to slow down, sustain and heal,” Chetan avers. Each piece in the Lotus Veda collection is crafted to give utmost importance to the comfort of the wearer, offering a comfort and easy dressing.
“Our team is 100 per cent dedicated to supporting slow and sustainable growth; to create a sensitive awareness about handloom’s and hand-printed textiles potential. Our future plans include consciously working towards minimum wastage or zero wastage policy. We work with raw materials, fabrics and accessories which are friendly to our environment, biodegradable and ethically made with a minimum carbon footprint,” Chetan pinpoints.
