“My tryst with block printing started off on a funny note. It was because of a personal need which upon research came to me as a personal problem most of the women felt. So, post pregnancy a woman’s body changes for good and it is difficult to find something that would be decent fit.

So having a background in merchandising, I decided to venture into block printing t shirts that would be customised as per the requirements of the customer. And right here, Hastha was born. It was a good deal as our standard sizing was researched among different Indian women and chosen.

As someone who had worked with textile brands before, I carried with me not only those experiences but also the complaints that people put forth. Block printed t shirts started picking up and with time, people started to enjoy our collections.

Around the time when the floods happened in chennai, the overall climate in the city was quite gloomy. Everywhere people were trying to make sense of everything that was happening and I decided that I needed to plunge in with something innovative in this atmosphere. A casual experiment with block printed umbrellas became an instant hit amongst the audiences. I would even go on to say that am quite proud to be the first person to come up with the idea for block printed umbrellas.

This soaring success brought in a lot of eyeballs to my brand. A school catering to the needs of special children reached out to us to ask if we could curate a program for their children. Since special children are the last to be considered for employment, I decided to try block printing with them as an experiment and it worked out really well for the both of us. Being tactile while also being repetitive, it is quite easy to take up on and turn it into a skill.

Today most of Hastha’s t-shirts are printed by the young adults with special needs of the Gurukulam school. This has in a way become something very close to my heart and in the long run, I would always want to work in this field to bring in more awareness and employment opportunities to people of this community.”

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