On most days, Ritu Devi arrives early, settles into her spot, and begins work with threads, fabric and colour. Ritu, who is from Ramaipur village in Kanpur district, has been working with SewMuchBetter since March 2025.

“Main finishing ka kaam karti hoon,” she tells The Better India. “I do finishing work. I love this work. I have three kids, and still I can give about eight hours here. It feels like a community.”

A few years ago, this would have been difficult to imagine.

In many parts of rural Uttar Pradesh, opportunities like this, tied to something as distant as fashion, rarely come into view even today. For women like Ritu, work that offers both income and belonging has long been scarce.

Today, that has begun to shift in small but visible ways inside a studio in Kanpur.

When shopping labels sparked a question

It started with something most of us do every day.

Akriti and Bhavya, now 25, remember browsing through brands like Zara and H&M, picking up pieces that felt stylish and affordable. But the labels on those clothes slowly began to bother them.

“We started noticing where our clothes were made,” Akriti shares with The Better India. “It made us curious about the people behind those garments and the conditions in which they were produced.”

That curiosity led them to read more about global garment supply chains. In their research, reports about poor factory conditions, low wages and intense production pressures began to surface.

The casual shopping habit started to feel more complicated. “We felt like clothes were losing their meaning,” Bhavya says.

2 people, 2 cities, 1 idea

The two had met as undergraduates and became close friends, bonded by long conversations about creativity and the kind of work they wanted to pursue.

Bhavya........

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