The Zenana Women team of our workshop in Lucknow, India

The team in India works under the banner of an Indian-registered company, Appropriate Improvement Fashions Pvt Ltd. If you want to know how AIF came by such a ridiculous name, email us and we’ll send you the story – for brevity’s sake we’ll blame the Indian bureaucracy. As you can read in “How we started”, it took the best part of a year to register this company – just how long it would’ve taken to get underway if we’d chosen to register as not-for-profit, with all the extra hoops to jump, I can’t imagine.

Though AIF is registered like any other company, we are committed to utilising all its profits for the empowerment of needy women. We understand it is very difficult for foreign directors to remit funds overseas from an Indian company, but we don’t know more because it’s not something we intend to do.

The goal in the long term is to transfer ownership of AIF to a society of women who have been trained in all aspects of a garment manufacture and export business, but that’s a way off yet. For now, the Lucknow team works closely with us in Australia, thanks to the wonders of e-communication.

Our current team contains both Hindu and Muslim faiths, Indian and Nepalese ethnicities, and contrary to Indian hierarchical tradition, women are the bosses. It’s a testament to the character of each individual that it all works so wonderfully well, though it can be viewed as a microcosm of Indian society, where stereotypes and the simplistic pictures of tension and violence generated by the media are very rarely true.

Mrs Pragya Singh

Pragya is our Production Manager, and the senior of the Lucknow ‘Magic Managers’. In our tiny organisation, she is the one responsible for sourcing all the materials and organising the production of our garments.

She takes each style through a process that starts with a design, or maybe a whacky “is this possible” concept request from Australia, to manufacture of a first design sample, then size sampling to make sure we’ve got sizing right, before final production. She’s always involved in design too, since her knowledge of embroidery styles and what is possible and appropriate on particular fabrics is invaluable, and she works with our embroidery providers to invent the embroidery design for each new style.

Pragya came to us well qualified for her role. (You can read more about how she came to join us in “How we started”.) Before moving to Lucknow to be a full-time, typically Indian devoted mum to her son, she worked in Delhi in an export house producing garments and home furnishings for the US and European markets. Once her son, at 10, was less dependent, she looked for a job that would capitalise on this experience with foreign buyers and working styles – just as we advertised for a Production Manager.

Pragya set the tone of the office from the day she started. She’s a perfectionist, so there was no training required in the high standards we wanted for our product – she runs a great quality control system. She embraced our “leave your caste, class and religious prejudices at the door” policy, and became fully committed to our objective of empowering poor women. However, she also demands of herself and all the team an efficient, professional approach that means the little office simply hums with both industry and good humour.

Ms Meenakshi Saxena

Meenakshi is the other “Magic Manager” of the Lucknow office and workshop, looking after all business, admin, financial and HR elements of the little company. She does everything from keeping the records of our very flexible ‘Time Off In Lieu’ system to book-keeping, and is the interface between the company and all the regulators, as well as the bank. This means her generous sense of humour is continually tested, and she is continually growing her capacity for patience!

Many of the tasks in Meenakshi’s job are new to her – her career before coming to us was in the Tax Department. She’s the most amazingly quick learner though, which I realised when I found out she didn’t attend an English-speaking school, but learned English as she studied for her Science degree, because it was the language the degree course was taught in! Add her talent for learning to her amazing talent for retaining long numbers in her head, and Meenakshi has turned out to be a wonderful asset to such a new organisation, where versatility and multi-skilling are essential.

On top of all this, Meenakshi has to have a superficial understanding of the production status, so that she can adequately supervise in Pragya’s absence. As a young woman supervising older men in a society where women are not generally regarded as men’s equals, she provides a wonderful example of quiet female strength for the women we work to empower.

Together, she and Pragya manage all the day-to-day operations of the Indian side of the business, though emails bounce back and forth between India and Australia throughout the working day.

Mr Asgar Ali – “Masterji”

We call him Masterji because he is a Master Tailor – the “ji” is for respect, as in “sir”. Masterji is the technical master of the team, who came to us for the challenge and interest of regularly making new styles.

Masterji’s home town is Basti, about 5 hours from Lucknow by train. He left his own tailoring business there to join AIF, which means he lives a long way from his family.

Earlier, Masterji worked in the export houses of Mumbai, so he has broad experience, but many of these businesses export to the Middle East and expat Indian communities abroad, where the most sought after qualities are Indian style and low price. So Masterji has learned with us two different drivers of his work – fit and quality. He says he has enjoyed these challenges, and he certainly produces beautiful work. He is the key to our training of women tailors to the high standards we expect.

Mr Amit Sharma

Amit is Assistant Tailor to Masterji. He was trained in his father’s workshop in the Old City area of Lucknow, and was looking to branch out from the limited scope of stitching menswear. Though a qualified tailor, he is now training in the particular needs of AIF, which is, we believe, the only workshop in Lucknow producing products in more Western styles, and to Western fit and quality requirements.

With Amit in our team, we have a base production capacity that can keep our orders ticking over. That means that from now on, we can employ women as trainee tailors, knowing that our product quality won’t suffer while we give them the time to learn and practise their skills in a supportive environment.

Ms Riya Gaur

Rhea has recently been appointed as a permanent member of the team, and she is our embroidery specialist. When she first showed us samples of her work, Pragya and I were struck by their quality. Since then, working on a casual basis, she’s proven to be creative as well as highly skilled, and the combination of Pragya, Masterji and Rhea has turned out some wonderful shawls and handbags, in addition to our garment range.

Rhea will now take over the important task of getting the embroidery motifs printed on our garments. Each individual garment must have its motifs printed in the correct position, before it goes to the craftswomen for weeks of embroidery work. The process of embroidery, from printing through to finishing, is described elsewhere.

Rhea’s other major task at the moment is to demonstrate to the women who provide embroidery for us, both the style and the quality of the embroidery we want. There are so many embroidery stitches, and such a range of possibilities in quality, that it’s highly valuable to demonstrate in this way.

In future, we hope to set up a small workroom where women can come to work on a daily basis. Rhea would supervise such a group of women, which we hope will include some women affected by HIV/AIDS, and operate not only as a safe and pleasant place to work, but as a form of support group. However, till then Rhea is fully occupied, and learning more all the time as we ask her for her inputs on our variations from traditional embroidery.

Mr Vinod Thapa

Vinod came to us as a man of known integrity, because he had been employed in a trusted position by Australian friends when we all lived in Lucknow. In AIF he is Office Assistant to both Pragya and Meenakshi, another position of multiple tasks and skills, from running errands to quality control and stock-taking.

Vinod’s education was limited by his family’s circumstances, but he’s quick to learn, so we’ve suggested he undertake computer training, at AIF expense, so that he can gain promotion as the company grows. We value Vinod’s ethics, and he is already a role model for the rest of the team.

Mr Shailendra Verma – “Shailu”

Shailu is our Office Boy, but he’s no ordinary Office Boy. Often in India, the work of this position involves only menial tasks – cleaning, making tea, shopping, answering the door etc. However, like everyone else on the team, Shailu’s job is much more than the title suggests. As well as the basic duties like those above, he assists the tailors in many aspects of their work, helping with measuring and trimming, washing samples, and sometimes even modelling!

Shailu grew up in a small village remote from Lucknow, where educational opportunities are very limited, so he reached only early Primary School levels. We’ve suggested he improve his employment prospects by doing some literacy and numeracy training at our expense – we hope he takes us up on the offer!