About Us

At Adjective, we believe that handlooms are heirlooms, brimming with the energy of the hands they were woven with. They are indeed alive. As a brand we aim to embody the magnificence of the life of our products and their makers.

Our brand name ‘Adjective’ is an attempt to present you with choices that can aesthetically define your life from your personal style to your interior design possibilities with minimal impact on our planet but maximum impact on the lives of our women artisans.

We work with women from different parts of the world to identify traditional skills that they have been practicing for generations. We collaborate with them and together we design and create collections that are universally appealing and utilitarian, generating continuous demand to build sustainable livelihoods using only natural and biodegradable materials. 

Our journey in exploring women centered crafts has first led us to India, paying tribute to our Founder’s homeland.

For that all important balance we also work with male master artisans who preserve heritage crafts and create absolute masterpieces.

Heritage, Heart & Hands

Our women artisans embody the true meaning of an inheritance. The heirloom pieces they create bear testimony to the dedication, love and pride that they uphold for their craft. It is not only a practice but a way of life and more importantly a legacy that they safeguard in order to pass on to the next generation.

  • Made in Small Batches

    Quality is of utmost importance be it in our products or in the lives of our women artisans. Our artisans get to enjoy their craft and get to do what they love with all the passion and dedication it deserves.

  • Create Livelihoods

    Women have been known to work best in groups, giving them the sense of community they need while also making a living. They find immense joy in sharing their creations and being rewarded for it.

  • Preserve Heritage Crafts

    Our artisans are second and third generation artisans, experts at a craft they learnt as children. Award winning artisans, whose craft is their life, their heirloom and their legacy.

Sneha Mohan, Founder & Creative Director, ADJECTIVE

I'm a serial entrepreneur. I started Word Quotient, a content writing company and ran it from 2007-2013 in Bangalore, India and London, UK. I chose to take a 4-year sabbatical to be a stay-at-home mother to my two boys. In 2017, I was driven to start Global Women’s Entrepreneurship Network (GWEN), through which I encouraged women to choose entrepreneurship and provided the support to sustain that decision through education and community. Adjective is an extension of my work at GWEN. I hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Kingston University, London and I'm working on my first novel.

My love for handmade began when I, as a young child visited my grandmother over the long Indian summers and watched her sew dresses for my cousins and me. Among all the keepsakes my grandmother made she also cross stitched all her grandchildren a pillowcase with their names on it (I still have mine to this day). As my grandmother grew older and her arthritic knee needed rest she stopped sewing and did more cross stitch. She always had a project at hand and one summer when she visited me in Bangalore, India, she unknowingly inspired me to pick up the needle. That set the stage for my love for creating something with my hands but its not until I myself was at the brink of motherhood that I began teaching myself crochet. Ever since 2012, I have been equally addicted to crochet as my grandmother was to cross stitch. 

My foray into working with artisans happened organically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indian artisans found themselves in appalling conditions after the lockdown for COVID-19 in 2020. Master weavers and skilled workers were deprived of their livelihoods overnight, without any warning. Visionaries in the industry started a national volunteer-led movement to provide relief from starvation, revive their sales channels and rejuvenate the industry on the whole. I joined this volunteer-led movement to help with the revival and rejuvenation efforts and there began this beautiful journey building relationships with weavers and artisans.

Today, we have a wide network of artisans from Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Odisha, Assam, West Bengal, Punjab, Rajasthan, Ladakh and Nagaland. All of them handloom weavers and artisans, creating each piece painstakingly over days, even months. Most of them second generation and third generation weavers from award winning artisan families, still creating heirlooms and keeping the legacy alive. 

A Historical Timeline of India's Creative Economy

The handloom industry in India is the second largest employer in the country, after agriculture. An estimated 200 million people depend on craft for their livelihoods. India produces an untapped goldmine of products that keep heritage crafts alive. These crafts are not just an intrinsic part of their cultural history but also their global competitive advantage. These crafts have the potential to change the lives of India’s women, youth and marginalised communities. 

World’s Largest Economy 1000 A.D. - 1700 A.D.

From the 11th Century to the 18th Century India was the world’s largest economy producing nearly 25% of the global industrial output. The artisan sector and agriculture dominated this landscape. India’s indigenous innovations drove the production of raw materials, metalware, textiles and food products for the local and global markets.

70 Years Post Independence - 2015

After gaining independence from two centuries of British rule and still finding her legs from the economic breakdown, almost 70 years later, India has become the land of micro-enterprises that employ between 2-9 people. Of its over 60 million enterprises, 84% of them are informal and run by households in rural settings. Of the 5600+ micro, small, and medium enterprise clusters over 3000 of them are craft-based. They draw from a portfolio of over 3000 craft traditions using processes that date as far back as 2500 BC.

India's Heritage 2025 and Later

With over 200 million livelihoods directly or indirectly linked to this sector, and 50% participation of women, craft-based production continues to be one of the primary means of dignified employment among informal rural communities. 90% of India’s artisan economy still operates informally. Craft-based work is often women artisans’ first taste of financial independence and, also a workplace that has the lowest barrier to entry.

By creating a market for their produce we empower women artisans, give them the chance to live better lives, contribute financially to their families, thereby garnering them the respect they deserve. Also, giving them the opportunity to educate their children so they can carry on this legacy of handmade through modern techniques, business development knowledge and design innovation prowess.

Discover Our Heritage Collections