A part of every saree we sell goes somewhere it should.
We do not put this on the home page. The brand is the saree. The brand is not us telling you we are good people.
But you asked, so here it is.
Prajwala is one of the longer partnerships. They have been doing rehabilitation and empowerment work for women in Hyderabad since the 1990s — for years before this brand was even named SUSHMI. The founder visited their facility for the first time in 2017, two years into the original online store. She came back from that visit a different kind of customer of her own life. We have supported them since.
What we send is not the work. What we send is the means. We sponsor programmes on their site, send paid work their way as livelihood, and contribute money where they tell us it is most useful. The work itself happens at their facility, on their terms — not ours. The women in their programme are not learning our craft. They are learning a livelihood they choose, and we are one of several customers, not the only one.
There are others. We do not name them all here. Some of the organisations we work with prefer to do what they do quietly, and we respect that. The list grows as the brand grows.
Beyond the partnership work — and this is the part the founder is most personal about — we pay for school books, school dresses, examination fees, school shoes, and the small things that decide whether a child in our part of the city stays in school or stops. The list of children we support is long, and growing. We do not keep a tally we publish.
This was the founder's personal commitment from the first sale. It has stayed personal since. The percentage of every sale that goes into this work only grows as the brand grows. There is no smaller-print version of that promise. We do not run discounts on it.
We are telling you this in the journal, not on the home page, because if you bought a saree from us, you should be able to find out what a part of your money does — but you should not have to have it sold to you on the way in.