The Ibu Movement hands pricing power to the artisans who make the clothes. Four founders reviving Himroo, Kalamkari, and Hausa embroidery share what that changes.
Ali MacGraw has been an ambassador for Ibu Movement since 2017, the year she collaborated on Ali4Ibu, a collection of jackets cut from cloth made by women’s artisan collectives working with the Charleston, South Carolina, nonprofit. “Together they are changing the lives of our sisters across the globe, and uniting our hopes and possibilities in this most difficult time,” MacGraw said at the time of the artisans behind the line. “It is a huge honor for me to be a small part of this great vision.”
The vision belongs to Susan Hull Walker, who founded Ibu Movement in 2014 and has spent the years since building a marketplace for women artisans in more than 50 countries. In May, Ibu launched Ibu Atelier, an incubator supported by Bank of America that gives ten women-led artisan enterprises design collaboration, business training, and direct access to global retail, drawing on assets from the Aspen Institute’s Artisan Alliance. The three collections unveiled so far come from Zaria, Nigeria; Srikalahasti, Andhra Pradesh; and Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
The terms of that marketplace are what make it unusual. “At Ibu, the bargaining power has always been with the artisans. They set the pricing and the minimums, as well as the terms of payment,” Walker told Ethos over email. “As the participating enterprises confirm new partnerships, they will negotiate terms and that will be an indicator of shifting agency.”
The price gap between Italian leather and Indian cloth
“I like to draw the comparison between the expectation around price for a handmade leather design crafted by a man in Italy, and the price of a handmade textile design crafted by a woman in the Global South. We’ve been taught to value them differently, although the skill required is equally high,” Walker says. “Through our messaging, we aim to educate the consumer (both retail and wholesale) as to this point.”
“We bargain and bicker over a pair of fully embroidered juthis (shoes) but have no issues over buying a pair of Nike trainers at 10 times the price – even though the latter has come off an assembly line while each juthi has been painstakingly and uniquely crafted by hand,” Laila Tyabji, chairperson of the Indian craft organization Dastkar, told the BBC last year. “Luxury brands that insist on not mentioning the origins are lacking confidence in their status and power,” Rachid Mohamed Rachid, chairman of Valentino, told Bloomberg. “I believe the future trend is going to be more transparency on production and workmanship origins.”
Women do most of the work; India’s Fourth All India Handloom Census counted more than 3.5 million handloom workers, of whom more than 2.5 million were women — more than 72 percent of the total.
PwC’s Voice of the Consumer Survey 2024, which polled more than 20,000 people across 31 countries and territories, found shoppers willing to pay an average of 9.7 percent more for sustainably produced or sourced goods. “What’s changed today is that consumers are asking more questions, such as who made the outfits, what raw materials were used, where it was made, and whether people behind the product will actually benefit from their purchase,” Walker says. “These have created more opportunities for smaller artisans to make meaningful investments for their craft and communities.”
How LoomKatha and DWARAKA revived near-extinct Indian textile crafts
Arushi Chowdhury Khanna founded LoomKatha in late 2016 and went looking for Himroo, the silk-and-cotton brocade introduced to Aurangabad in the 13th century and sustained for generations under Mughal and Nizam patronage. “From over a 100 operational looms the numbers dwindled to zero when we began working with Himroo in 2019,” Khanna told Ethos, attributing the collapse to powerloom competition in the 1990s. LoomKatha has since restarted two of the original looms and built four new ones; Vital Voices, which named Khanna a 2023 fellow, credits the company’s model with doubling artisan incomes from $70 to $150 a month within two years.
Early work used single-color motifs where the difficulty sat in harnessing the loom rather than throwing the shuttle, and the weavers have since moved to motifs of up to four colors, a rationing of complexity that let a dormant skill rebuild itself. “Ibu was the first customer for our Himroo,” Khanna says. “Within a couple of months they had placed their first order. While this was under production, COVID hit and delivery was delayed. Yet, they accepted the entire order and have continued to order with us every year since. This brought stability to our operations which enabled us to keep growing in the initial years.” Ibu’s design team kept to the boundary Khanna set.
“We have never altered the motifs or the traditional structure of the weave but we have introduced colourways that were inline with the trend forecasts of the season as shared with us by Ibu,” Khanna said. “Flattening the craft is the greatest disservice we can do because it then falls between 2 chairs–neither is it as affordable as a mill woven fabric nor does it have the appeal of the original craft.”
Anita Reddy’s entry into Kalamkari came through a debt crisis. “One day, in 1998 I found myself in Srikalahasthi. This was in response to a cry from that region where many a woman was a victim of moneylenders harassing their families and debt driven weavers and artisans ending their lives in despair,” Reddy told Ethos. “What stood out to me even as a first time visitor, was the potential for change, for harnessing local skills (that had until then remained in the domain of a few male artists) plus a dire need to intervene and help villages where dalit women were in the throes of penury.” DWARAKA — Development of Weavers and Rural Artisans in Kalamkari — began with 18 women and now numbers approximately 1,000 artisans, according to Ibu, which awarded the collective a $15,000 Atelier grant. Each hand-painted piece takes a minimum of two weeks.
Reddy measures the model in households. “In DWARAKA’s case one artist’s tears wiped is one family saved. A family plus another 50 become a village awakened. One awakened village becomes the inspiration for the next. Just one woman seen standing up against exploitation becomes the role model to others,” she says. “Radical transparency, Mutual acceptance of fair pay schedules and amounts, collaborative designing, ethical consumption, and above all cultural preservation are among the different factors that make Ibu a respectable partner with DWARAKA,” she said of the arrangement.
Ibu treats its roster as deliberately impermanent. “We have worked with enterprises that have expanded such that we are no longer able to design directly with them. In some cases, we continue to purchase their own designs for our marketplaces, and we always celebrate their growth,” she says. “There is a wealth of enterprises around the world that are looking for outlets to market their designs, so we are constantly adding to our roster of partners. The process is a cycle, and as some groups grow and move on, we are already bringing in new groups.”
What sustainable fashion means for artisan livelihoods
Hassana Yusuf runs Queen Amina, a cooperative of Hausa embroiderers started in Zaria in 1994 and named for the ruler of Zazzau who enlarged her domain through conquest in the 16th century. Robe embroidery in the city was carried out by men until the 1970s. “Socially, there is often increased confidence, intergenerational knowledge transfer, and stronger recognition of cultural value. In many cases, women artisans gain greater economic agency within their households and communities. Equally important, younger generations begin to see traditional skills not as outdated practices, but as viable creative and entrepreneurial careers,” Yusuf says, describing what has shifted for the women in Zaria as the value of the embroidery began staying with the people stitching it.
The Atelier’s contribution was largely administrative. “Ibu Atelier gave us structure. Through the design cohort, we gained a clearer understanding of the complexity of both design and production, especially when working at scale and balancing tradition with contemporary design,” Yusuf told Ethos. The pricing problem persists all the same. “Handmade products are sometimes undervalued despite the skill, labor, and cultural expertise involved. Women artisans frequently have to work harder to position their craft as premium and commercially scalable.”
“There is still a gap between celebrating craftsmanship in marketing narratives and ensuring that artisans receive fair compensation, stable work, and long-term economic security,” said Megha Agarwal, founder of Studio Maeve, an India-based label working in Ikat and Kantha. “As designers and entrepreneurs, we must ensure this translates to the well-being of the people who create these products.”
Agarwal builds her collections around handwoven cloth cut into contemporary shapes, a choice she frames as the condition of the craft’s survival. “They need viable livelihoods, access to better markets, opportunities to learn and experiment, and recognition for the skill involved in their work. They also need the freedom to evolve their craft rather than feeling that they have to reproduce the same techniques and designs exactly as previous generations did,” she says of the makers coming up behind her. “I also believe there is an important distinction between preserving a craft and keeping it frozen in time.”
Reddy is candid that the economics do not always cooperate, since painting on certified sustainable handloom cloth doubles the cost and pushes the finished piece into a range few buyers will meet. “If eradicating poverty is the prime issue there have to be varied approaches to the same solution. Beyond romantic ideologies are factual issues,” she said.
Khanna defines the word by the working calendar. “It expands to mean commitment, trust and ‘showing up’ everyday no matter what. If a weaver is weaving a naturally dyed, locally grown organic cotton fabric but doesn’t have enough work for every single day of the year then it cannot be termed sustainable,” she says. “Sustainability means ensuring the artisan has sufficient work to be gainfully employed through the year, the remuneration is in-line with norms for skilled work, the artisan has the opportunity to move beyond being a wage earner to commanding a premium for his creative capabilities.”
“At Ibu, we work with the skills that our artisans already have. These are skills that are passed down through generations, which carry meaning, memory, and story as a kind of cultural language,” Walker adds. “The real shift in luxury will come when that expertise is valued economically, not just aesthetically.”
“For us, sustainability is much more than just the fabric we use. When I look at the women we work with, I think about the knowledge in their hands, the techniques they learnt from their mothers and the stories that have been passed down through generations. If those women can no longer earn from that skill, or if the younger generation sees no future in it, then we are slowly losing something, even if the fabric itself is still there,” Yusuf said. “So when I say sustainability, I mean keeping the whole system alive, the woman, her skill, her livelihood, the culture behind the embroidery, and the market that allows it to continue. I want a young woman to be able to look at this craft and say, ‘I can build something with this.’ That, to me, is true sustainability.”
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