DOAB: handloom you can trust
A slow-fashion saree label that bought straight from artisans, paid them fairly, and told buyers exactly what they were getting.
- Timeline
- Jun 2024 to Dec 2025
- Platform
- Shopify, Instagram, exhibitions
- Role
- Co-founder
- Owned
- Brand, packaging, store, social
Overview
DOAB was a slow-fashion saree label I co-founded with my best friend, Priyanka. The idea was simple: buy straight from artisans in Jaipur, Lucknow and Bengal, pay them fairly, and tell buyers exactly who made each saree and how. Doab means the land between two rivers. Ours were the Ganga and the Yamuna, whose plains hold much of North India's handloom.
I ran the brand, from the name, logo and palette to the photography, the Shopify store and the voice. Priyanka ran sourcing, customers, influencers and marketing, though we crossed into each other's work all the time. We ran it for eighteen months, from June 2024 to December 2025, and this page follows one question through all of it: how do you make trust visible?
The problem
Most buyers can't tell real handloom from a copy, and the maker gets paid last.
Buyers pay handloom prices for machine-made copies because they can't tell the two apart. At the other end, the artisans who make the real thing earn very little while retailers keep most of the margin. We wanted to fix both ends at once: buy only from makers, pay them properly, use only natural fabric and dye, and teach buyers enough to trust what they were getting.
Research
Two in three weaver households earn under ₹5,000 a month
The numbers behind the pay gap are stark. India's last handloom census counted about 31 lakh households working in handloom, and 67% of weaver households earned less than ₹5,000 a month. The makers we interviewed said the same thing in their own words: the craft is fine, the pay isn't.
Source: Office of the Development Commissioner for Handlooms (2019), Fourth All India Handloom Census 2019–20, Ministry of Textiles, Government of India.
The law protects handloom, the market doesn't
On paper, weavers are already protected. India has a law meant to shield traditional handloom from powerlooms and mills, yet machine-made copies are still sold as handloom, and most of the buyers we interviewed couldn't tell them apart. That gap, between what's real and what buyers can see, became our brief.
Source: The Handlooms (Reservation of Articles for Production) Act, 1985, Government of India.
Two makers we designed for
To keep the makers in every decision, two personas stand in for the six block printers and four chikankari and zardozi artisans we interviewed: Rajeev, a block printer in Bagru, and Akbar, a chikankari artisan in Lucknow.
What buyers asked for
On the other side, 50 customer interviews told us what buyers wanted: light cotton and linen sarees they could wear every day, between ₹1,000 and ₹10,000, and the story of who made them and how.
Process
From idea to buyer
Every saree followed the same path
With makers and buyers mapped, every saree followed the same path, from forecasting what to make to putting it in front of a buyer. Exhibitions brought in most of our sales, but we built the online side too, because we wanted DOAB to grow into an e-commerce brand.
The range
About fifty sarees, each fabric matched to its craft
Sarees made sense because one size fits everyone, so less stock goes unsold. Over eighteen months the range grew to about fifty, and we matched each fabric to the craft it carries best: light Bengal cottons and a softer cotton-linen blend for block prints, pure linen for kantha, silks for kalamkari and dabu, and just one or two organza sarees at a time, at around ₹15,000. The figure breaks it down fabric by fabric.
The brand
Indigo, taken back
The brand had to be as honest as the product. Mulmul, linen and indigo were each prized before colonial trade, and each suffered under it. Indigo became a symbol of forced farming, so we made it our base colour to take it back.
Two rivers and three words
The mark builds on that: an indigo square with river lines above and below for the Ganga and the Yamuna. Beside it, the wordmark sets DOAB in Garet next to दोआब in Devanagari, and the tagline, Craft | Culture | Couture, names three things in the order a buyer meets them.
One job for each colour
Each colour has one job: indigo for the mark, teal for anything you press, and marigold as the accent once the eco-print line began. Everything else is set in Cormorant Garamond.
The same brand at the door
I designed the packaging, washcare labels and business card as one set, so the brand a buyer found online or at a stall was the same one that arrived at their door. The washcare labels mattered most, because handloom and natural dyes need gentler washing than machine-made cloth. Orders went out by India Post, which cost us less and cut the carbon of every delivery.
Experiments
Eco-printing with festival flowers
We kept trying new ideas alongside the main range, and eco-printing was the second experiment we ran. Temples throw out marigolds after festivals, and eco-printing steams the colour straight from the petals onto the cloth, so no two sarees match. We made three patterns from one flower and recycled 5 kg of flower waste before we closed.
Selling it
Exhibitions where our buyers lived
Most of the range sold in person. We ran one or two exhibitions a month in upscale residential societies across Delhi NCR, because that's where our buyers were: well-off women, roughly 25 to 50. A stall also let the fabric make its own case. Mulmul is far lighter than even linen, so light that a photo can't show it, and people understood that the moment they held a saree.
₹8,000 on an average day
On an average exhibition day we made about ₹8,000. Our best single day made ₹40,000, at the Noida Flower Festival.
Reach alone didn't turn into orders
Online, who you reached mattered more than how many. Most of our influencer videos paid off, but our biggest reel hit 4.3 million views and barely moved sales, because the person in it had a large audience, just not one that buys handloom sarees. Reach only helps when the face in the video is someone your buyers already follow and trust.
The store
Story first, then the shop
The store had the same lesson to learn. Its first version opened straight onto a product grid, so I rebuilt it to lead with the story, then the process, then the shop, and added accordions on each product page for fabric, care and the artisan. The bounce rate fell by about 20%.
Impact
Eighteen months, two founders, no outside money, and 20 to 30 orders a month. Three results stand out.
The one I trust most is the zero. Nobody sent a saree back, which tells me the product pages described exactly what arrived, and buyers said so themselves in messages like these.
Next phase
We closed in December 2025. We were bootstrapped, the money ran out, and Priyanka left to prepare for an MBA. Had we kept going, eco-print would have followed the festival calendar, with a counter on the homepage tracking flower waste against a 100 kg goal.
Reflection
DOAB taught me that design reaches well past the screen. The brand lived in a parcel, a stall, a caption and a product page, and every one of them had to tell the same story about where the fabric came from.
It also showed me which part of the work I wanted to keep. Of everything I ran, I kept coming back to the store, the packaging and the product pages, and that is what led me to product design.