On most days, Ritu Devi arrives early, settles into her spot, and begins work with threads, fabric and colour. Ritu, who is from Ramaipur village in Kanpur district, has been working with SewMuchBetter since March 2025.
“Main finishing ka kaam karti hoon,” she tells The Better India. “I do finishing work. I love this work. I have three kids, and still I can give about eight hours here. It feels like a community.”
A few years ago, this would have been difficult to imagine.
In many parts of rural Uttar Pradesh, opportunities like this, tied to something as distant as fashion, rarely come into view even today. For women like Ritu, work that offers both income and belonging has long been scarce.
Today, that has begun to shift in small but visible ways inside a studio in Kanpur.
When shopping labels sparked a question
It started with something most of us do every day.
Akriti and Bhavya, now 25, remember browsing through brands like Zara and H&M, picking up pieces that felt stylish and affordable. But the labels on those clothes slowly began to bother them.
“We started noticing where our clothes were made,” Akriti shares with The Better India. “It made us curious about the people behind those garments and the conditions in which they were produced.”
From stitching to eco-printing, SewMuchBetter is bringing women together to learn, earn and build a space of their own through sustainable fashion.
That curiosity led them to read more about global garment supply chains. In their research, reports about poor factory conditions, low wages and intense production pressures began to surface.
The casual shopping habit started to feel more complicated. “We felt like clothes were losing their meaning,” Bhavya says.
2 people, 2 cities, 1 idea
The two had met as undergraduates and became close friends, bonded by long conversations about creativity and the kind of work they wanted to pursue.
Bhavya was drawn towards fashion and textile design. Akriti grew increasingly interested in sustainability and the environmental cost of consumption.
Their strengths were different, but they thought alike.
After graduation, their lives took them to different places. Akriti remained in India to pursue an MBA in sustainability, while Bhavya moved to the United Kingdom from September 2023 to December 2024 for her MSc in Textile, Sustainability, and Innovation.
The distance made their conversations more focused.
Across time zones, they spoke almost every day, exchanging ideas about what they were learning and questioning how the fashion industry functioned.
One topic that reappeared constantly was the culture of fast fashion in India. Clothing, they realised, was increasingly designed for short-lived trends.
The two friends wanted to create clothing that people would return to again and again, garments that carried a sense of value and connection. “We didn’t want to talk about sustainability only in the language of handicraft,” Akriti shares. “It also includes how long a piece lasts and whether people truly want to keep wearing it.”
Learning from household wisdom
As these conversations evolved, Akriti and Bhavya began noticing something closer to home.
In the households around them, many women had long practised forms of reuse and repair that embodied the very principles of sustainability. Old fabrics were stitched into quilts, sometimes into clothes for young children, and very little was discarded casually.
“Our house helps, and the women in our neighbourhood were incredibly inventive,” Bhavya says. “They could transform something old into something useful without wasting anything.”
An employee, Ritu sews with fabrics dyed from discarded temple flowers and kitchen waste, stitching sustainability into every piece.
Those observations began shaping a new direction for their work.
Could their idea of fashion grow into a space where other women could participate, experiment and contribute their own skills?
The raw material and where it comes from
At the same time, Bhavya’s research into plant-based dyes was opening up new possibilities. The two began experimenting with organic materials to see how colours could be extracted without relying on synthetic chemicals.
That search for raw materials eventually led them to an unlikely source: temple waste.
In Kanpur, where they now run their studio, flowers offered during prayers and ceremonies are often discarded afterwards. Akriti and Bhavya began reaching out to temples in their neighbourhood, asking if they could collect these flowers instead.
Today, around six temples regularly set aside floral waste for them every week.
“If there is a kirtan (devotional gathering) or a large gathering, we request them to keep the flowers,” Bhavya says. “We collect them and bring them back to the studio.”
Their search for materials extends beyond temples.
In the households around them, many women had long practised forms of reuse and repair that embodied the very principles of sustainability.
Weddings and community events often generate piles of flowers that would otherwise be thrown away. During festivals like Diwali, the two also scout for leftover floral decorations that can be repurposed.
Back in their workspace, the petals are processed and transformed into natural dyes.
Kitchen waste has become another source of colour. Onion peels, avocado skins and other organic scraps produce subtle pigments that can be used in fabric dyeing.
From January 2025 to February 2026, they repurposed about 200 to 300 kg of temple flowers and kitchen waste.
Where colour becomes community
Over time, these experiments grew into SewMuchBetter.
Inside this space, women like Ritu Devi are part of the process, contributing their skills while earning an income. For some, it is also a first exposure to the idea of fashion as a field.
Currently, six women work in-house at their studio in Kanpur, while five women work from their homes on finishing, stitching and accessory-making across Kanpur and Delhi.
Nisha Patel, 21, is one of them.
“I love everything about fashion,” she says. “But I could not pursue it. I had the interest, but I never got the exposure.”
Nisha’s specialisation at SewMuchBetter is eco-printing, a craft she learnt in the studio and has made her own. She thinks in patterns, explores new compositions and geometric placements, and makes her prints the basis of many pieces in the collection.
In many rural areas, subjects like fashion design or textile work remain distant. For Nisha, who is currently in her second year of a BA degree, the studio has opened a different possibility.
At SewMuchBetter’s Kanpur studio, women artisans are learning new skills, earning incomes, and turning discarded flowers and kitchen waste into sustainable fashion with creativity and care.
She is now learning fabric printing while earning alongside.
“I don’t have very big expenses yet,” she says. “But sometimes, I use what I earn here to support my education.”
Operating from their Kanpur studio, SewMuchBetter now works closely with women artisans and continues to experiment with plant-based dyes and sustainable design.
“I want to live in a world where choosing sustainably doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, it feels like the most obvious, exciting decision you make all day,” Akriti tells The Better India.
For Akriti and Bhavya, fashion can move away from the logic of waste. Sometimes, it can begin with something that was meant to be discarded, even a temple offering, a handful of onion peels, or a skill that never had a stage.
As Bhavya puts it, “The most extraordinary colour lab of the future has no walls, just a brick, a bird, a patch of mud and a designer who never stopped looking.”
