Kavita Parmar sits in Madrid, two hours away from Europe, and six from America — both regions important to her business. “It’s a very gentle, kind city,” she says. In 2008, when she had the idea to borrow money and pour all her savings into buying a beautiful little building in the middle of Madrid and “turn it into an experiential retail store where one walked through the design department to get to the store on the top floor,” her friends and relatives found her crazy. It was too complicated — business was doing well, why this? “Most people in the west have become so distanced from the process of making anything that even with these garments they think it has been spat out by a machine. They don’t understand when they see embroidery that there’s somebody with a little needle working at it. It just blows their mind.”
At this point, 300 stores were selling her products but Lehman brothers — the American global finance services firm founded in 1850 — filed for bankruptcy, and everything went kaput. Recalling that time, Kavita says, “I realised how intrinsically linked economies have become. And I felt very frustrated, even if I did everything right, I didn’t exist in a bubble. It was beyond my control.” This professionally difficult time coincided with personal tragedy. Kavita lost her mother and had to leave everything to embark upon a 14 day ritualistic journey with her family in India.
Moments of such deep and resounding tragedies become epicentres radiating seismic transformations outwards. And so it happened with Kavita: “My husband who works in tech sort of threw a gauntlet at me and said, ‘Kavita, if you don’t like what you see, then change it.’ It made me think, mom’s gone and my most important valuable asset was not money but time. It gave me the idea that human beings must connect back to the process and to the humans who ‘made’ things. I inherited my grandma’s shawl, made over a period of 10 years by a man who had come from Kashmir to Punjab, every year. And my grandma would give him money.” This exchange of product and money was not as direct as modern consumerism. It was wrapped in other sentiments as well, of appreciation for the craft, delayed gratification, and respect for the process.
1: Kavita Parmar, building a practice of collectivity; 2: Artisans as the cornerstone of industry
And so, I Owe You (IOU) — a brand and a platform enabling transparency and traceability are championed — was born.
Her husband helped with the tech side of things — “which basically was a tech solution on how to tell stories about craft, how we could give authorship back to the weaver, the embroiderer, the place of origin” — and the project came into being. However, when she took IOU to luxury brands, she was taken aback. “Everyone thought it was a great idea. Nobody wanted it. The reason was they didn’t want people to know who their weaver or artisan was. But it was not their artisan or weaver because they were not hiring them full time. I just thought, this is wrong, and decided to do an experiment with Madras because I am obsessed with it,” she says. “My dad used to wear lungi all the time. And just then, in 2010, is when he passed away as well. I went and lived in Kudalore in Pondicherry for two months, documented 253 weavers and decided to give it the denomination of origin that it deserved by its storytelling.”
She calls the experience magical — backed by a strong purpose: “I would buy the fabric directly from the weavers and take it to the best factory that makes jackets in Italy. Why? Because I wanted to really use globalisation for what globalisation was originally.” This experiment took on, the internet discovered Kavita and she was invited to give TED talks, awarded by the mayor of New York, and even set up a company in the Big Apple.
1: Every weave, every fabric, begins with diligent hands working together; 2: The tools and tangibility of fashion
But she did not keep IOU for herself. “I had already built a brand called Rasta and started another one called Susie Wong, which one of my distributors had asked for and they were doing really well. I had already made that journey, sold in Barneys, Nordstrom, and Galerie Lafayette, and amazing stores in Japan. What I really wanted to do was shift the narrative and the system,” she says.
It is indeed a long path to traverse for some who entered the industry, in her own words, “from the back end.” It began in Hong Kong where Kavita was doing a lot of sourcing work: “It gave me a unique perspective of the industry because I got to work with a lot of small artisans and communities in Southeast Asia. But then from the production development, I was working with these major industrial houses, whether it was in China or Hong Kong or back then even Vietnam or Sri Lanka or India. This ability to produce new ideas very quickly with an artisan and also understand how thread is made, or fibres are mixed, was an education.” So when she moved to Spain with her husband and set up her own company, it took off. She says, “I was one of these designers who actually knew how to produce, which is rare because design normally teaches you about the superficiality of how to produce an idea but not necessarily how to make it make it into a product garment.”
XTANT grew out of this desire to always connect back to the artisan, to keep craftsmanship in the loop: “I started to try to sell the idea to all my retailers that why don’t we do events in the retail stores? I could literally see how ‘online’ was going to eat the cake. I said to my retailers, I can fly in a weaver or embroiderer and we can talk ahead of the game. And of course, no one listened to me. They all thought, well, that sounds so complicated.” Today, the event first started in 2018, takes place in Mallorca, Spain, with venues like Can Vivot, Can Balaguer, and Casa Museo Can Marquès. It includes hands-on workshops, exhibitions, and conversations, providing a space for learning and exchange. As the co-founder and creative director, she has brought her artisan-first ethos to the event. It explores the sacredness of textiles, value systems, and the importance of ancestral wisdom.
1: Where skill meets style; 2: The inseparability of the tools from the skill and the artisan
For Kavita, the bottomline amidst all success — commercial and otherwise — when it comes to the artisans remains: “We are doing business with them. We are equals. I am a designer. I can learn from them.” With XTANT Kavita grows, not individually but alongside an entire community of artisans, designers, and heritage.
Words by Ayesha Suhail
Image Courtesy XTANT
