An engineering graduate has been making Khadi jeans long before Baba Ramdev’s ‘Swadeshi jeans’

With Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev recently announcing his plan to launch ‘Swadeshi jeans’ to take on multinational corporations, desi jeans enthusiasts may have to wait at least another year before the product actually hits the shelves.

If you are not willing to wait, you can try ‘DesiTude’, a jeans manufactured by an Indian brand, that to out of pure handloom khadi materials.

Launched in April this year, DesiTude is the brainchild of Siddharth Mohan Nair, an Energy and Environmental Engineering graduate from Kerala.

A khadi enthusiast himself, Siddharth says he came up with the idea purely by chance after hearing about it in an exhibition in Mumbai earlier this year.

And then he took a leap into being an entrepreneur in a sector, which he had no prior knowledge about, that too with an initial investment of just Rs. 30, 000 on loan.

Siddharth said that ever since the launch of DesiTude, the response he received is positive and there is a lot of interest among people to try it out, even though initially people were skeptical about the quality.

He however accepts that the price of the jeans is on the higher side, close to Rs. 3,500. This he says is due to the material and production process of the special denim which is hand-spun. But this hasn’t deterred potential customers, he said adding that the interest is only growing.

The denim raw material is manufactured by the khadi sangh which is then pre-washed multiple times to ensure that the colour-bleeding and shrinking which is associated with natural fabric is taken care of before stitching.

Currently, available only through online DesiTude provides denim custom-tailored for every single order.

Even though they are receiving bulk order and interest from abroad, Siddharth said they were not entertaining them as of now, as the product is ‘tailor-made’ for each customer based on their preferences including size and colour.

“I have an emotional attachment to khadi, and I want that to continue. Khadi has a lot of human involvement, from collection the cotton to extraction and spinning. So I wanted the human touch in the garment too,” he explains.

He has gone into minute details including the logo on the jeans to make it pure khadi. Unlike others DesiTude logo is block printed on khadi with natural dye and doesn’t use leather.

Even the packaging is unique – the material is made out of cotton and stitched by women from a village in Andhra Pradesh, also providing them a livelihood.

DesiTude’s social commitment doesn’t stop there, for every denim sold they plant a tree sapling.

Keeping his love for ‘Indianness’, along with the brand, Siddharth said all the orders are dispatched through India post, even though private couriers offer cheaper services.

Source: indiatimes