About us : Parvai (பார்வை)
Parvai means vision, or a way of seeing, in Tamil. When we began in 2016, we were interested in what might happen if we looked at craft not simply as something to preserve, produce or sell, but as a language through which people could meet. The maker, the material, the process, the person developing the product and, importantly, the patron who eventually chooses it all have something to say. Parvai grew from wanting to bring these voices closer together. Nearly everything we understand about our work today has come from looking a little more closely. A beautiful sari may first catch our attention, but there is always more to see. Who made it? What did they have to know to make it? What could have been done better? What does the material allow? How does it feel when worn? What does the patron see in it that perhaps the maker or designer did not? These questions keep the work interesting and continue to shape what Parvai has become.
Craft as a Language
For us, craft is a language, a medium of communication and a means of connection. It carries knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to the next, while leaving room for new ideas, new people and new perspectives to enter. A material speaks to the hand working with it. A maker responds through knowledge and practice. A designer introduces another thought. A patron arrives with a different life, taste, memory and perspective. Somewhere between all of them, something new becomes possible. This is what makes craft profoundly human to us. It creates conversations between people who may otherwise never have known one another. It allows knowledge, imagination, skill, aspiration and joy to travel. Like every living language, we believe it becomes richer when people are able to participate in it rather than simply observe it.
We Make
Parvai is a producer, not a curator or reseller. We begin with an idea and build from there. We develop the design, invest in raw materials, create or support the infrastructure required for production and remain involved until there is a finished product in our hands. We assume the financial responsibility of putting something into production because we believe that responsibility cannot simply be transferred to the person making it. We work across weaving, printing, dyeing, embroidery, tailoring and other handmade practices with people and craft communities across India. Some products take days to make and others occupy looms and workspaces for weeks or months. We make remarkably little, and that smallness is intentional. It allows us to remain close enough to the work to notice, question, learn and improve. Heritage cannot be an excuse for mediocrity, just as handmade cannot be an excuse for poor quality. We want each attempt to teach us something and each product to take us a little closer to excellence.
People and Possibility
The people who work with Parvai are not all master craftspeople, nor do we believe mastery should be the only doorway into craft. We work with highly accomplished makers whose knowledge has been built through decades and generations of practice, but we work just as willingly with people who are learning, people who want to build careers in craft and people who simply discover that they enjoy making and have the curiosity and willingness to become good at it. We value all of these beginnings. If craft is to have a meaningful future, there must be space not only for those who have already mastered it, but for someone to begin. People need opportunities to practise, meaningful work through which to improve, good materials to work with and an economic reason to continue. Our purpose is therefore not simply to find skill, but to create opportunities through which skill can grow. A young maker can become confident, an experienced maker can attempt something more ambitious, a technique can become more precise and a designer can learn something entirely new from a loom. Excellence, to us, is not something people simply possess. It is something that can be built through opportunity, practice, patience and the willingness to keep improving.
Product, People, Process and Perspective
Over time, four ideas have become inseparable from the way we work: Product, People, Process and Perspective. The Product must ultimately be good. Craft, provenance, history and storytelling cannot compensate for poor material, weak design or inadequate construction. People are the intelligence and possibility within the work and must have the opportunity, resources, respect and compensation required to do it well. Process gives the product its integrity and helps us understand not only how something was made, but where it can become better. Perspective keeps the conversation open. A weaver sees a sari differently from a designer. A dyer understands colour differently from the person wearing it. A patron may notice something that none of us involved in making it noticed at all. We find those differences valuable. Only when we begin to see and discern, when we meet the people, understand the processes and allow different perspectives into the same conversation, do the parties cease to stand at opposite ends of a transaction and begin to participate in a shared circle of creativity and human ingenuity.
The Patron and Our Promise
The patron has always been essential to Parvai. Good craft cannot sustain itself through makers alone. It needs people who see, discern, question, appreciate and support the time and effort required to make something well. Some of our happiest work has grown through relationships with patrons over many years. Someone discovers Parvai, asks questions, chooses something, returns, understands us a little better and allows us to understand them. Eventually we may find ourselves discussing a colour months before a loom is prepared, looking together at an old textile, reconsidering the scale of a motif or developing something specifically for a person whose sensibilities we have come to know. These relationships have taught us something we believe very strongly: artists and craft wisdom are not rare. Patrons are.
Our Promise begins with the product, but extends to everything surrounding it. What we tell our patrons should be true. What we make should justify its value. What we know about its material, construction, people and process should be shared openly. But beyond information and transparency, we want to offer the joy of the experience itself. The pleasure of discovering why a textile feels the way it does, understanding what a loom can and cannot do, meeting someone whose hands made something you love, watching an idea travel from conversation to material and finally into your hands. We want our patrons to know enough about what they own that the relationship with it becomes richer. For our long standing patrons, very little about the work needs to remain behind a curtain. By prior arrangement, our studios, workspaces, people and processes become places they can encounter for themselves, because we believe that seeing more allows us to understand more, and understanding creates a very different kind of appreciation.
Beyond Buying and Selling
The realm of work we occupy is far greater than buying and selling. Craft is fundamentally a community activity. It continues because someone chooses to make, someone else chooses to learn, another person teaches, someone creates an opportunity, someone invests, someone experiments and, somewhere, another person sees value in what emerges and chooses to support it. For this reason, we have never really thought of Parvai simply as a brand. We think of it as an effort, an endeavour and a continuing act of participation. We work with individual patrons, but we also work with like minded entrepreneurs, designers, retailers and businesses to develop and produce products and to create meaningful avenues through which the spirit and practice of craft can travel further. The objective is not for everything to carry the Parvai name. The larger purpose is for good work to have more places to go, for makers to have more opportunities to practise, for businesses to participate responsibly and for more people to discover the intelligence and pleasure contained within something well made.
A Living Circle
We do not see craft as a straight line beginning with a maker and ending with a buyer. We see a circle. A maker brings knowledge or the willingness to acquire it. A designer brings another way of looking. Materials and processes introduce possibilities and limitations of their own. The patron brings discernment, imagination, experience and purpose. Each has something to contribute and something to learn. When People, Process, Product and Perspective meet with openness and empathy, craft becomes more than an object changing hands. It becomes a shared human activity in which knowledge moves, skills improve, ideas change, relationships form and something new is created. Someone makes with purpose, someone else receives with understanding and joy, and what all of us learn finds its way back into what we make next.
Our Way of Seeing
We care deeply about preservation, but preservation for us has never meant holding something perfectly still. Craft is alive because people continue to practise it, question it, use it, improve it and find meaning in it. We would rather create reasons for craft to continue. Give someone an opportunity to learn. Give a maker meaningful work through which to keep practising. Give an experienced artisan the resources to attempt something more ambitious. Make the next product better than the previous one. Give a patron enough information and access to discern quality for themselves. Bring people closer to one another and allow different perspectives to enter. Then take everything we have learnt and begin again.
There is extraordinary human intelligence held within craft, not only in what we have inherited, but in what people are capable of creating with that knowledge today. Parvai exists somewhere between all these people and possibilities, helping one find the other. For makers, we hope to create opportunity, practice, meaningful work and the possibility of excellence. For patrons, we promise good products, transparency, participation and the joy of experiencing craft more completely. For entrepreneurs and businesses who choose to work with us, we hope to create another avenue through which thoughtful making can find relevance and new audiences. Perhaps this is what our name has gradually come to mean to us. To see more is to understand more. To understand more is to participate with greater empathy. And when people begin to see, make, learn and participate together, remarkable things become possible.
Parvai. An effort, an endeavour, and our way of seeing.