Hand-stitched in Lahore

In a narrow lane in the old city, behind a door that gives nothing away, six people make every tote we sell. The workshop has one long table, three windows, and a radio nobody is allowed to turn off.

Our canvas arrives raw and stiff. It is cut by hand, panel by panel, against a paper pattern that has been redrawn eleven times. The block-printed band along the base is pressed separately, dried on a line across the courtyard, then stitched in place while the ink still smells faintly of the workshop.

A bag should take a day to make and a decade to wear out.

The seams are doubled and the handles anchored with a box stitch that takes four times longer than a straight run. It is the part nobody sees and the first part that fails on a cheaper bag, which is exactly why we do it.