VMPL

Gwalior (Madhya Pradesh) [India], October 29: iTokri.com has more than 2,000 handmade woollen pieces in stock as the winter opens, drawn from a dozen Indian crafts across seven states. The range runs from handwoven merino shawls and stoles made in the weaving villages of Kutch to woollen fabric sold by the half-metre, and includes a kind of cloth that is hard to find elsewhere: block prints and tie-dye traditions that grew up on cotton, worked by hand onto handwoven wool.

Built over a year, from Kutch outward. Last October was the first time the platform treated winter as a season to be designed rather than a stretch to be got through. The buying this year started inside the season, the moment the response was visible, and purchase commitments have rolled month on month since. Stock does not arrive on a launch day. It arrives as a stream: new woollens list every week as they come in from the clusters, alongside the roughly 500 new products iTokri adds across its catalogue each week. The base is still Kutch. Around it, the range has widened over the year to the hill weavers of Kumaun in Uttarakhand, the hand-knitters of Kullu in Himachal Pradesh, the pashmina of Kashmir, and the embroidery of Punjab.

The crafts on wool this winter.

*         Kutch handloom. Shawls and stoles woven on pit looms in the villages around Bhujodi by the Vankar weaving community, whose founding cloth is the dhabla, the thick wool blanket-shawl once woven for the Rabari herders; the craft is covered by the Kachchh Shawls Geographical Indication.

*         Ajrakh. Resist-and-mordant block printing from Kutch, printed on both faces of the cloth and dyed principally in natural indigo and madder, here on a woollen base.

*         Sanganeri. Hand block printing from Sanganer near Jaipur, direct-printed floral work on a bleached ground, a registered Geographical Indication since 2010.

*         Bandhani. Tie-resist dyeing, the pattern tied knot by knot before the dye bath and released after; on wool the dots sit on a denser, warmer ground.

*         Bagh. Natural-dye block printing from Bagh in Madhya Pradesh, alizarin red and iron black, river-washed and sun-finished, worked here onto woollen mufflers and stoles.

*         Kumaun weaving, Kullu hand-knits, Kashmir pashmina, Phulkari, shibori, ikat and dabu on wool, felted namda.

Every product page names the base cloth and the process on it, and says which cluster wove the piece and which printed it. iTokri buys woollen fabric from weavers and mills, and finished shawls and stoles directly from craft clusters; it does not buy raw wool and does not work at the fibre level.

Why wool is slow. The second step is the one that cannot be hurried. A printer who works on cotton all summer takes a handwoven woollen shawl into the same sequence of mordant, resist and dye baths, and the cloth dries between each one in the open air. Cluster capacity and that second process step are finite, which is why the range is built backward from the platform's commitment to the weavers and printers, and why it arrives through the winter rather than all at once.

'It has taken us a lot of time to prepare this collection over the last twelve months. The way we built winter is something tremendously satisfying,' said Nitin Pamnani, co-founder, iTokri.com.

The winter range is live at itokri.com/collections/woollens-on-itokri, with new arrivals weekly through January. Every order ships from Gwalior with a handwritten note.

About iTokri.com

iTokri.com is a curated, inventory-led direct-to-consumer platform for handmade Indian textiles and handicrafts, founded in Gwalior in 2012 by Nitin and Jia Pamnani. It works directly with artisan workshops across more than 500 craft clusters, keeps every listed product in stock, and ships worldwide. The artisan is the designer.

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iTokri.com

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Website: https://itokri.com/

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