Keep Calm & Go Green!

I need to fess up. My name is Tai, and I’m Magazine-aholic. I get magazines from all over the world. I mean everywhere. Oh yes, it’s bad.

It’s not just because I love the gorgeous pictures and enjoy flicking through the pages. I genuinely love observing the lives of others – their personal quirks, their cultural and geographic influences. It’s a bit like "people watching” in Europe, you could do it all day, given the right café and Palazzo.

It also helps that in a past incarnation I worked in newspapers and magazines both in journalism and advertising. I studied philosophy and religion and thought I would be an International Foreign Correspondent but somehow I ended up on fashion magazines. Go figure. The Universe always seems to have another agenda for you. That’s ok – you make do, as my second passion is textiles and interiors.

When I started Bandhini as a single mum, in my home garage in 1993 my story was always to go green. It was not terribly fashionable then – something reserved for Hippies and Activists. Yeah Ok, I may have been a bit of both. But my idea of green, was caring about not only how products were made and with what, but caring about the people making it. I cared that they were looked after and paid well. I couldn’t bear the thought of displacing them and making them work in substandard places. I wanted craft done right from their Villages and their homes and communities.