10 Years of Sahana

Journal, November 2026. A letter from our founder and designer,

Ten years.

I have written this letter many times in my head. On the drive home from the post office. At the designing table, late, when the house is finally quiet. In a courtyard in Ghornash, India, chai going cold beside me. Each time it began somewhere different. Each time it ended in the same place. With you.

A girl who noticed the cloth.

Before Sahana had a name, it was a dream I carried as a girl.

I noticed cloth & textile before I had words for it. The way it was made by hand, how it fell and moved as a woman walked across a room. How the right piece could change the way she held herself.

I didn’t know then that it would become my life’s work. I only knew I wanted to create clothing women would love to live in. Pieces that felt natural to wear, that brought a quiet confidence, and allowed a woman to feel more like herself.

Ten years ago, that dream became a small label with a big intention. It is still the same intention.

I will be honest. When I started, I didn't know how to run a clothing brand. There was no business plan. There was intuition, and a sense of the community I wanted to build. I watched our seasons change, and our bodies change with them. I wanted clothing that changed with us. That was enough to begin.

Hundreds of setbacks.

Ten years is not a straight line. It is a weave, and some rows had to be unpicked.

There were hundreds of setbacks. A dye lot that came back the wrong blue. A shipment held at a port for weeks. A design I loved that did not survive its first fitting. Monsoons that slowed a collection to almost nothing, because damp yarn will not release cleanly on the loom. Our newest collection, Lumina, took more than nine months to make. The block print bleed and had to be completely dropped from the collection. Some days I wondered how to keep going.

Every setback taught me the same thing. Cloth made properly will not be rushed. Neither will a life's work.

What kept me going was never a plan. It was the connection we built. The weavers, their lives, their families, whose livelihoods are woven into ours. And you, the women who kept coming back. So we waited, we adjusted, and we kept going.

What Sahana taught me.

My relationship with textile has changed in ten years. At first I loved the cloth for how it looked. Now I love it for what it holds.

In Ghornash, in West Bengal, the looms sit in the floors of homes. The first sound you hear through the front door is the loom. Sukanto Dey weaves the intricate Jamdani motifs. His wife, Jaba, spins the thread on her charkha and weaves the plain ground beneath them. Raghunath, one of our master weavers, told me what it meant to bring old weaves to life again: a way of honouring what his parents and ancestors wove before him.

These are master craftspeople, and their livelihoods are woven into ours. When we commit to a collection, we commit to months of work in their homes. Every design decision I make here is also a decision about someone's year, their household, their children's schooling. I do not take that lightly. It is the most serious part of what I do, and the part I am proudest of.

For the woman you are now.

Over ten years, you have told me what you love. Not always in words. In the pieces you come back for. In the photos you send. In the friends you bring.

One of you sent pictures of a dress turned inside out, every seam enclosed and finished with a french seam, and said she almost wanted to wear it that way. Others have told me they feel like themselves again. That is the joy of this work. Watching a woman put something on and recognise herself. That is the real reward of this work. Not the milestones. Watching a woman put something on and feel comfortable, and entirely herself.

Our bodies change. Through motherhood, through the years, through seasons we choose and seasons we do not. So we design for drape and ease over fit, for cloth that moves with you and falls with you. A woman in her thirties and a woman in her seventies should both feel beautiful, confident and entirely herself, at every stage of her life.

Thoughtful clothing.

How we make clothing matters as much as how we wear it.

A single length of Jamdani passes through around twenty hand processes and dozens of pairs of hands before it reaches you. Farmers, spinners, dyers, warp-dressers, weavers, finishers. Indigo, madder and pomegranate, fixed by hand over days and dried in the sun. A loom with no electricity.

So I ask you what I ask myself. Stop for a moment. Look at what you are wearing. Who made it? How long did it take? What story does it carry? Thoughtful clothing is worn with attention. More importantly, it is made with attention. That is the promise of every piece we create.

It is not just clothing.

When you wear Sahana, you carry every hand that made it. Jaba's hours at the wheel. Sukanto's months at the loom. The dyer's stained fingers. The sun that set the colour.

And they carry you. I tell the weavers where their cloth goes. That women in Australia and beyond wear it to markets, to dinners, to quiet mornings, to the ordinary and important moments of a life. Their hands are in every one of those moments.

That is what ten years has really built. Not a collection of garments. A line of connection, running from a loom in West Bengal to your wardrobe, linking one woman's hours to another woman's days. It is not just clothing. It is connecting all of us.