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 products that are universally 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.

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. 

By creating a market for their produce we empower women, give them the chance to live better lives, contribute financially to their families, thereby garnering them the respect they deserve and relieve them from domestic abuse and the appalling societal problems they are born into. 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.

 

Our Women Artisans in India



Nagaland, North East India
These women weavers are primarily farmers who live in remote villages like Meluri and Chizami in Nagaland. They practice their ancestral heritage craft of weaving using cotton naturally dyed yarn. They weave on back strap looms set up in front of their houses. When their work in the fields ends they come home and weave to supplement their income to raise and educate their families. These women are part of Chizami Weaves, an initiative dedicated to promoting and preserving the unique textile tradition of Nagaland, while ensuring sustainable livelihoods for economically marginalized women.



 Rajasthan, North West India
This group of skilled women artisans live in a land steeped in rich cultural heritage but people who still lived in another time, in a parallel world of sorts, ridden with societal problems of female foeticide, domestic violence, illiteracy, child marriage, human trafficking, superstitions, poor family planning, no rights for women, shortage of water and no electricity.  Through their work as artisans they make a living and gain that much deserved independence by doing what they are skilled at already.




Kutch, Gujarat, West India
These women are experts in their traditional craft of Rabari embroidery, a skill that has been passed down for generations and kept alive through initiatives like this.




Karnataka, South India
This unit was started in 2019 as a self-help group learning to sew. They are now expert tailors who can stitch garments, home decor products, fabric toys and accessories.

 

 

Our Story

 

Sneha Mohan
Founder & Creative Director

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 network of women artisans from Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Odisha, 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. 

Adjective is an extension of my work at Global Women’s Entrepreneurship Network (GWEN). At Adjective, we primarily work with women artisans and artisan organizations that upskill and provide employment to economically marginalised women. 

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. I hold an M.A. in Creative Writing from Kingston University, London and I'm a children's book author.