Shivam Punjya re-launches behno in India, as a label offering luxury handbags

The label’s creative director shares how he founded the brand eight years ago quite by accident, the social impact his work has, and his attempts to tackle gender disparity among artisans

When Shivam Punjya first introduced his ‘advanced contemporary’ womenswear label, behno, to India in 2015, his intent was very clear. At a glittering event held in Mumbai–at an art gallery, no less–Punjya hosted a talk by filmmaker Andrew Morgan on the making of his acclaimed documentary The True Cost, that examined the impact of fast fashion on people and the planet. This was no conventional “New York brand comes to Mumbai” launch party but an opportunity to start conversations about ethical manufacturing practices and the welfare of women artisans in a room full of fashion cognoscenti.  

Punjya spoke about his vision for behno ( ‘sisters’ in Hindi) and presented ‘The behno standard’, listing a compendium of six categories that included healthcare, garment worker social mobility, family planning, women’s rights, worker satisfaction and benefits, and eco-consciousness. The idealism was unmistakable and the determination more so. 

Eight years later, when we connect on a Zoom call, a lot has changed. Punjya’s label has pivoted from ready-to-wear clothing to making luxury handbags. Actor Katrina Kaif is not only the brand ambassador for the New York-based brand but also a business investor. And Punjya, now 34, a California boy, has relocated to Mumbai. 

Yet, a lot remains the same. The passion for ethical production standards and worker upliftment remains as persistent as ever. The contemporary aesthetic of his clothing label has been translated into a line of chic handbags, that are produced with partner companies that either maintain ‘the behno standard’ or are in the process of aligning to it. 

A turning point

With degrees in international political economy and global health, Punjya, a self-confessed academic, arrived at his eventual career choice quite by accident, right after the Rana Plaza collapse in Dhaka on 24 April 2013, where over 1,100 garment factory workers were killed. “Just a few months prior to this tragedy, I was doing research in Jaipur and Hyderabad, collecting data for my thesis on folic acid supplements for women of reproductive age, for the Indian Institute of Public Health. A lot of the participants for my study were textile weavers. When the Rana Plaza collapse happened, I found it very unnerving, because so many of the women that were killed were similar to the women that I had worked with. I was living in their home to understand their behaviour better and getting to know them intimately. But I didn’t contextualise it until the incident,” recalls Punjya.

His close-knit joint family became his sounding board. His two mothers and two fathers–“my mom’s younger sister married my father’s younger brother”–gave him two choices when he voiced his angst about the situation: Take action or accept it and move on. This led to the eventual creation of MSA Ethos, a cut-and-sew factory at Muni Seva Ashram near Vadodara in 2014, where Punjya attempted to “redefine ethical manufacturing”. 

REDEFINING ‘MADE IN INDIA’ 

When he found no takers in a hesitant market, he decided to make sample garments to draw clients in. “It was meant to be a golden standard for us to showcase what we were capable of doing. In that process, branded stores started liking the product and asked to stock the garments,” says Punjya, explaining the genesis of behno, a brand formally launched in 2015, that championed the cause of women in the garment trade, and attempted to elevate the perception and quality of clothes “made in India”. 

Today, behno’s ready-to-wear womenswear line is produced on collaborative project basis only; the last time was for the Commonwealth Fashion Exchange in 2018, where Punjya collaborated with women artisans from the the Fafine Niutao I Aotearoa cooperative in Tuvalu, New Zealand, to showcase the potential of the artisans’ fashion skills and highlight sustainability. That was also the year Punjya decided to change his brand’s focus to handbags and accessories. “We were designing bags as a styling element for our look books, just for fun. And we realised that buyers were paying more attention to the bags than the clothing. Our then acting CEO made a decision to make a pivot, because there was a huge white space for a design-forward handbag brand. We also realised that our social impact on the back end was directly related to how financially successful our business was,” he says. 

So while commercial reasons may have made the pivot inevitable, Punjya is determined to uphold ‘the behno standard’ in this completely new field–the leather industry. The challenges he has faced range from navigating safety concerns in tanneries, where workers often resist using protective gear, to confronting gender-based roles limiting women’s involvement, and even dealing with caste-related complexities. “A lot of the cut-and-make is done mostly by men. But 90 per cent of our finishing and edge painting–what truly defines a luxury bag–is done by women,” says Punjya, determined to start meaningful conversations to understand and hopefully change the gender disparity.

BUILDING A MEANINGFUL STORY

With behno working with two tanneries, in Venice and Chennai, and three cut-and-sew factories, one in Nashik and two in Kolkata–all tethered by a design team based in New York–Punjya is finally ready to bring his luxury bags to Indian shores. “For me, it was a slightly problematic, even colonial approach, where we're coming to this country [India], extracting resources, but not making the product available for the Indian market. We wanted to enter the market in a meaningful way with a strong partner on board, a global citizen.” Enter Katrina Kaif, who has come on board as behno’s brand ambassador, and cemented the partnership as an investor. With behno bags available online on Tata Cliq Luxury, Punjya wants to focus on quality control and customer experience for now

His marketing background has taught him the importance of building a story around a brand. This was very much evident at the re-launch event in Mumbai last month, where several influencers co-hosted the event as ‘Friends of behno’. “The behno standard has always been collaborative. Even the knot detail on our handbags is symbolic of different communities coming together, holding hands and standing up. I’ve always believed that together, we’re more powerful,” says an ever-optimistic Punjya.   

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