Crafting Comfort. One Rug At a Time.
Hi Everyone, My Name is Mahelaka!
I make rugs. My family has been making rugs in a small town called Bhadohi, Uttar Pradesh, for about 50 years. My older brother has been designing rugs for 12 years, drawing them by hand. I learned how to design rugs from him. Later, I also learned to design them on a computer. I help my family make rugs.
After I got married, I moved to a part of Bhadohi where my husband's family also made rugs. Here, I saw that many middlemen or agents would help us sell our rugs. But they took a huge part of our earnings. This meant my family and our workers were left with very little money.
In my village, my family is the only one with a rug-making unit. About 50 to 60 families in our village, mostly women, work for us and support their families.
Everything was going normally until COVID-19 hit. All businesses were affected, and our rug-making stopped. Our workers and artisans lost their jobs. The money we did earn, the middlemen took most of it, leaving us with almost nothing.
That's when we realized we needed to sell our rugs directly online. We heard about Etsy, so we opened a shop there and started selling. Now, we can reach customers easily and sell our rugs without any middlemen.
Thanks to Etsy, our business has grown online. We no longer have to pay anyone else. The money we save from not paying middlemen, we now use to help our workers and grow our company.
