Aadyam Handwoven, the Aditya Birla Group’s CSR initiative, is a social enterprise dedicated to bringing India’s handloom heritage into the present, while creating a more sustainable future for its artisan communities. Rooted in authenticity, impact and revival, the brand has given traditional crafts a renewed relevance while ensuring they continue to thrive. It’s been a rather interesting decade at Aadyam. From starting out with a presence at three retail outlets between Delhi’s Khan Market and DLF Promenade, and Mumbai’s Phoenix Palladium Mall, the handwoven brand has found out-of-the-box answers to marketing its handwoven products through experiences, an expanded product portfolio and brand ambassadors who believe in handwoven.
Aadyam Handwoven is funded by the Grasim Jan Seva Trust, a charitable organisation supported by Grasim Industries of the Aditya Birla Group that focuses on community welfare and healthcare services. Since we last wrote about Aadyam Handwoven in 2022 (https://thefeaturist.net/2022/11/25/a-passion-and-the-thrill-of-it/), the brand has found its own standing in the retail and marketing sphere. Being a social enterprise with limited marketing budgets, it is not possible for the company to spend on marketing and retail the way a typical brand can. Manish Saksena, business lead at Aadyam Handwoven has done things differently. He chose to take the experiential marketing route. “We have tried the regular retail store, and we have seen that retail is something that is not really viable beyond a point because the customers for handwoven are far and few. They have to be the ones who are truly discerning about it,” says Manish Saksena, business lead, Aadyam Handwoven. “The thing with our brand is that you will buy it as somebody who loves textiles, not that you will buy it because there is a brand name or a designer name or has prestige value attached to it,” he says. Somebody who wants to buy a Rs1 lakh sari, or a Rs30,000 sari has to really be a connoisseur of textile.
Showcasing the brand to a limited target audience of 100 or 200 people through an innovative channel or an innovative activation, is what worked for Aadyam. According to Saksena, in textiles you can only sell the product up to a point, and after a point the customer is going to be like ‘ok I have understood it but I’m not necessarily in love with it or I don’t know why I should pay this much for it’. That’s when the story telling has to come in.
To begin with, Aadyam made films about their weaving clusters. This content was shared across its social media handles – Instagram and YouTube. Realising this could become boring because not everyone is interested in the technical side of textiles, the only way to engage better with the customer was to extend the story. So events like a musical ensemble with singer Shubha Mudgal were planned. “It was a very beautifully put together ensemble by her where the whole storyline came through the lyrics about how the textile and fabrics have been an integral part of the seasons, the mood or the vibe. Interestingly, various traditional folk art forms like gajri, chaiti, potwe and fabrics in general were incorporated in the lyrics,” says Saksena.
As India has seen different kinds of historical influences, various kinds of art forms have evolved , which is what led Saksena to think there is a bigger story to tell than just a textile story. Three years ago, the company took the idea of Culture Beyond Textiles and developed it into a property where it takes the performing arts, conversations, books, classical singing, food and many other aspects of culture and uses them as a way of storytelling about the clusters that Aadyam works with. What Saksena means by conversations is meaningful conversations with people who have worked in the space of handloom. For instance, the brand had a conversation with Malvika Singh about her book Personal Heirlooms: Stories from the collection of Malvika Singh. Another conversation was on the revival of Gadwal as a weave with Hyderabad based connoisseurs of handwoven, Ratna Rao and Savita Suri. Another curation that has really worked well for the brand is Bebak, a two day Sufi festival at Delhi’s Sunder Nursery. Over the last few years, baithak culture and performances have also caught on and have become trendy and commercial.
According to Saksena, what works for the brand in the textile space is authenticity and that is what they are trying to do when they talk about performing arts. The company is not trying to do something which is appealing to the masses in that sense. “This is something that has taken the brand to a very small niche audience which is what it truly deserves. People have started to recognize the kind of ecosystem and the sound we have created for the brand. That is something that I really value,” he adds.
Aadyam’s product range has expanded as well. What started with three clusters: Banaras, Bhuj and Pochampally, then two more clusters of Bhadhoi and Mirzapur have been added for their floor furnishings. Kashmir for pashmina and Gadwal from Andhra Pradesh were added. Cotton clusters from Andhra Pradesh – Venkatagiri, Upada, Angada and Pulakurta – were also added. More products within these clusters were introduced. So for example, the Bhuj cluster does an innumerable number of products for Aadyam – floor furnishings, shawls, rugs and carpets. Besides apparel and home furnishings, the hand made vocabulary has been expanded to include handmade body mist and room sprays from Kannauch.
On the retail front, Saksena has realised that the brand doesn’t work well in a mall. “A mall audience is not really our kind of audience,” he says. Though the brand has a store at the Phoenix Palladium in Mumbai, malls like Delhi’s DLF Promenade or DLF Emporio are not necessarily spaces for Aadyam. “We work better in a high street which is stand-alone and a place which is almost like the destination,” he explains. Aadyam has three retail stores, one each in Delhi (Khan Market), Mumbai (Phoenix Palladium) and Hyderabad (Banjara Hills).
As handloom customers are spread out, online sales have worked for the company. Customers are a mix of every kind of tier, but the company has a lot of traction from tier 2 towns and the south of India. Since the last six months, the brand has also been shipping overseas. Though a bit sporadic still, the largest traction has come from the expat population in the US. Products-wise, saris, shawls and dupattas do well in the domestic market while home furnishings do better internationally.
Having reached many touch points, the brand needed a face. Konkana Sen Sharma and Shobita Dhulipala have been brand ambassadors for Aadyam since November 2025. “The reason they work well for us is they are not a typical face. “We are not using them as a face to make the brand look pretty or to make the brand look aspirational in a classical sense. What works with these personalities is that they really feel for handloom just as what we would like our customer to be. So when they talk about handloom, they talk with their heart,” says Saksena.
The present wave of sustainability, slow fashion and conscious consumption has been good for the brand but, according to Saksena, the brand’s customer is someone who has always been this way. So while there is always a fresh customer who is coming because of these attributes, the core customer has been an ardent fan of handloom textiles. Saksena is glad the company is getting their patronage.