Aishwarya Jhawar

We are Minakshi & Aishwarya Jhawar, a mother-daughter duo, looking for mediums to express ourselves. We work with the form & functions of basic materials and embed them in our day-to-day lives. So, here we are looking to tell & capture stories through our handcrafted stationery & accessories. I am Aishwarya Jhawar, a major in Urban Planning & Product Designing from Srishti Institute of Art Design & Technology, Bangalore, I set on my journey in my College and that journey is called Ekatra. We're probably a lot alike, you & I. At some point in her homemaking, Minakshi started to wonder why was she doing all these things she really didn't want to, and couldn't come up with an answer. We both started to wonder about alternatives and took a teetering step towards freedom. We, organically, started with this work and saw that freedom could start with self-employment and everything else could be figured out along the way. We knew so many such women who were in search of the same, slowly we are trying to bring all such like-minded females together. In all this chaos, we were able to build a team of 13 headstrong homemakers. This is a small effort in helping them become more confident and independent. We are firm believers of sustainability and creativity, all our products are crafted with utmost attention to the details along with insuring zero waste. Everything that we do here is guided by our manifesto - celebrate little things. At Ekatra we try to be a harbinger of change in the life of our artisans. We are a female-led brand where we work every day to ensure that our team gets to become financially independent and gain new skills along the journey of upcycling, recycling, and making. With women empowerment at the heart of everything we do, we try to engage women from underprivileged communities who have often been exposed less or have received very little education. These are homemakers who become the artisans and designers of ours and their futures. These women come from very distinctive backgrounds – we scout them mostly through word of mouth, and they join us for a variety of reasons, each as unique as they are – but end us uniting for their passion to move the community forward. Along with women empowerment, our another key focus is the environmental impact. We are conscious of our sourcing, we work with azo-free cloth in organic cotton, and we are also trying to be intention of the waste that we leave behind. Whatever paper and cloth residues are left in our workshop, it is up cycled into a smaller product or our business cards. Even smaller paper shreds are then convert into recycled paper and further used in production. We work with bamboo paper for creating a more elaborate gifting experience for you all. The packaging material to protect the product is 50+ micron biodegradable wrap. With our little impact we encourage the community around as well to make more conscious choices in their daily being.