Meet Simran Marwah, our partner manufacturer in India

From the moment we established Olivia Florence, we were dedicated to ensuring our garments would be made in the most ethical, sustainable way possible. It's for this reason we feel blessed to have found Simran, who runs her own company called New Chapterr in India, to help us achieve this.

Simran has worked in the rag trade in India for 30 years, with both local and international businesses, and with top-end designer labels as well as departmental. She speaks passionately about her country and has spent her lifetime exploring and appreciating its beauty. On the precipice of adulthood, she took what would be a formative trip around India. 

‘I rode from the tip of the south right up to Ladakh, which is on the Chinese border,’ Simran remembers. ‘We took these really old vintage motorbikes and it was a lot of fun. It was a lifetime ago – I think I was about 21 – and I fell in love with my country tremendously.’

Over the years, she has seen the change in India’s landscapes firsthand, with landfills in India now overflowing and groundwater resources being exhausted.

‘The thing that broke my heart the most was the environment being taken to pieces,' says Simran. 'Since I'm so fortunate to have travelled through this country, I know what a delicate balance the natural world is.’

As the damaging practices of her own industry increased, Simran knew she wanted to be part of the movement towards doing things a different way. She found that producing things in the traditional artisan way minimised damage to the environment because it consumed less resources, but when she began questioning the standard way of doing things in India – fast, with large machines and cheap labour – she was met with resistance from large brands that didn’t want to hear it. 

‘Nobody in India was having these conversations when I began,' says Simran. 'The global brands wanted to shut me down, they didn't want to know about it. They were all about price, about saving pennies. That was the focus.'

She knew it was going to take small, incremental changes at an individual level to make a difference, so slowly but surely, and despite great challenges, Simran began shifting her practices. The establishment of her business, New Chapterr, was the result.

‘I work with suppliers I completely trust – people who follow the process – and with weavers and printers I know and have worked with for years. I know that they follow the process of sustainability and fair trade,’ she explains. 

She also makes a point of looking for small companies that might be struggling, rather than going to the big mills. Fabric is sourced ethically, through a fair trade process, and the entire manufacturing process is completed in small-batch methods. 

Through her overseas travels, Simran has seen with her own eyes the imbalance of power between large retailers and the people actually making the product in India. ‘It seemed like we were back in the Colonial era of the British, when everything was taken away from us,' she says. 'The prices that things were being sold for abroad, versus what the cotton pluckers, or weavers, or dyers, were being paid was completely unbalanced.’

To counteract this, Simran became a strong advocate for fair wages. She ensures that her tailors are paid what they deserve and are on record, given proper sick leave and health insurance. She is also passionate about employing women and makes a point of looking for suppliers that have a 50/50 ratio of males and females, which is rare in India. She employs over fifty women – who she refers to as the 'chatty women' – that do the final finishes on garments, like button sewing, thread cutting and checking. 

'Imagine 25 women per table, constantly chatting about their families and husbands and mothers-in-law,' says Simran. 'It's like one big coffee or wine evening, but even then, the product you have at the end is fantastic. Women are multi-taskers, so they can get around having a chat while doing all of this. It's quite amusing to see it happening.' 

Women performing this important role serves a deeper purpose, too. ‘You see that the women come into their own when they're in the factory,' says Simran. 'They're professionals and they make the call while checking the work that the male tailors did. This is very different for a traditional society like India. The women are empowered.’

Right now, the devastating COVID crisis in India, and the subsequent effects on workers in the manufacturing industry, are in front of mind for Simran. On top of the unspeakably high death toll, the industry has also been left for dead, with many large companies cancelling orders because of delays in production. 

‘It's quite heartbreaking. It's very heartbreaking, actually. Big companies are just companies, not people. For them, commercial viability is everything, and they've started to pull out because manufacturing has gone down in the time of COVID,’ says Simran.

People in India are scared of losing further business, so workers are being forced to put their lives at risk to continue manufacturing in small, confined spaces. Simran observes that whilst some companies may commit to ethical practices on paper, when it comes down to being ethical themselves, and supporting a country when it's on its knees, they are nowhere to be found. 

‘These are companies that can easily sustain themselves financially, or make public announcements that orders coming out of India are going to be late because they're supporting the Indian people during covid. They can do that, but they don't.'

Even though her own sales have plummeted, Simran is doing everything she can to keep people in jobs. She is using her own money to continue production, without a guarantee of profit, so that her suppliers have work, and don’t have to let people go.

In the future, Simran hopes that people will have more awareness of and empathy towards what is happening outside their own countries. Perhaps the one good thing COVID will have taught us is the importance of looking out for your fellow brothers and sisters, even when they're halfway around the world. 

'My question is this,' says Simran. 'If you were in lockdown, did you enjoy your lockdown? You were safe, but you were alone, and you're not going to enjoy this planet if you're alone. It's time to think beyond surviving on your own. Pennies aren't saving us. People are saving us. The neighbour who took you to hospital, the guy who donated blood. They're saving you, not your money. But if your money can save someone, save anyone, then go ahead and spend.’