Saheli Women is a non-profit social enterprise, founded by IPHD in 2015, with the aim to financially empower the ladies of Bhikamkor village in rural Rajasthan through creating ethical and sustainable fashion. The Saheli Women is a female atelier established on fair and inclusive principles, with the aim to create prosperity through livelihood opportunities. To achieve this, we empower women through teaching them traditional and modern embroidery techniques. Our atelier is a fear-free creative place for ladies to work where they get the freedom to design their working hours and holidays.

All the products made by Saheli Women are designed and sold by our partners — luxury ethical fashion houses and designers from countries around the world including England, Germany, Australia, and the US.\r\n\r\nWe understand that the clothing value chain is complex, and one of our strengths is that we offer personalized assistance to our partners from the pre- to post-production stages.\r\n\r\nWe help partners source local Indian fabric and trimmings, including organic cotton, vegetable-dyed cotton, block print, ahimsa silk or satin. We then prepare a sample with a male master tailor in Jodhpur, teach the women in the village to stitch and embroider the designs and send the finished products via parcel to our partners’ warehouses.\r\n\r\nUnderpinning everything we do is quality assurance. Every article we produce is inspected by our Quality Assurance Team, which includes two female managers in the village — to ensure that it is created to your satisfaction.\r\n\r\nOur promise to our partners and our beneficiaries is built on the principles of fairness and non-exploitation.

Challenges\r\n\r\nIt started with one woman. Madhu Vaishnav’s mission was to empower the ladies of the Bhikamkor community to become providers for themselves and their families. She was first exposed to the village while visiting for a wedding. With only $100 , the first humanitarian workshops in the village were established. Unfortunately, the women were unable to use this new information because they had no income. However, Madhu saw that every woman in the village owned a sewing machine as part of their marriage dowry. She saw this as an opportunity to begin a skills training course as part of a fashion social enterprise.\r\nIn the beginning, it was difficult to persuade the women to leave their homes. The Bhikamkor community maintains conservative views, and the ladies had to gain permission from their husbands and in-laws to participate in our training sessions. While many women attended the early sessions, a large number dropped out as they realized the meticulous nature of the sewing, stitching, and garment construction techniques. Along with this, most of the women in these training sessions were illiterate, and even understanding numbers and measurements was new. \r\nAs we began to train only 5 dedicated women, this change in the ladies leaving home each day proved to be a difficult cultural shift. This represents one of the most crucial ongoing issues for the Saheli Project and IPHD as a whole: breaking cultural norms while maintaining family values. This was one of the main factors in the slow initial growth of the project. The cultural situation is improving, thanks in part to both the initial brave ladies who left their homes, but also their trusting families and husbands who believed in them.\r\nOnce we were able to train the initial group of Saheli ladies, and they began to earn a salary, they set an example for the rest of the community. It started with small clutches. At first, they were in disbelief in earning 3,000 rupees per month. As we began to partner with more brands their salaries steadily grew. 4 years later, we have trained and employed 45 ladies earning 10,000 - 15,000 rupees per month as part-time or full-time.

The main objective of Saheli Women is to provide livelihood opportunities and economic empowerment to women in the rural village of Bhikamkor in Rajasthan, India. Alongside our primary goal, we strive to achieve sustainable production by targeting to the three aspects of sustainability: the economic, environmental and social facets of sustainability. \r\n\r\n1. Our approach to sustainable production\r\nRather than seeing sustainability strictly in different silos, we see sustainability as a circle We believe in a circular supply chain, and that sustainability should be ensured from production to consumer. Sustainability should be ensured from top to bottom, from creator to consumer. Our partnerships with fashion brands play a pivotal role in this. To ensure the consumer is aware of the life of the artisan, we add a small brochure as a clothing tag which presents the woman who created the garment.\r\n\r\n2. Economic sustainability\r\nSaheli Women prides itself in offering a happy work environment, a living wage and fair working conditions. This allows for the women working here to dedicate themselves to refining their skills and capacities, as well as innovate.Saheli Women began as a social enterprise with five women and a budget of 100 USD. It has since grown into a team of forty women, and reported a revenue of 80.000 USD in 2018/19. By training and employing local women, Saheli Women has provided a unique opportunity to the most deprived women of Bhikamkor to become financially empowered and capable. \r\n\r\n3. Social sustainability \r\nWe follow all the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals mentioned by the Ethical Fashion Initiate by the United Nations. As a women’s empowerment non-profit organisation, we aim to achieve empowerment of the women of rural India, and choose to do this through the means of fashion. \r\n\r\n4. Environmental sustainability Our production process is tailored to minimize environmental damage and present a sustainable and efficient method of creating garments while avoiding harm to the environment. More than half of the raw materials we work with is either recycled of up-cycled fabric. Further, we avoid the use of plastic, by using either shell or coconut buttons on the garments and by packaging garments in bags made of unbleached cotton or recycled saris.

ZAZI Vintage, Devi.clothes, Mountain and Moon, Chaos and Colour, Shaanti, Manimekala, etc.