It started with a laptop sleeve.
Someone at SRK had bought one of ours months earlier and carried it to work every day. At some point in January they looked at it and thought, we should be giving these to our people. So they wrote to us. No brief, no deck, no long list of requirements - just a message from someone who already knew what our work felt like in their own hands. We never had to explain why a hand-printed thing is different from a printed thing. They'd been living with the answer all year.
What they wanted wasn't one product but a whole set that looked like it came from one place. So we made a printing kit, with the blocks and ink and cloth inside, so whoever opened it could have a go themselves. Tote bags. Framed prints, because not everything in a gift needs a use. Laptop sleeves, the ones that started all of this, with little drawstring bags to match. Blocks carved fresh that had never existed before and won't be used for anyone else. And their name printed onto the boxes, so the whole thing arrived looking like one idea instead of six.
Four hundred and twenty-five hampers. Every one printed by hand, one press at a time.
Here's the thing most people never think to ask us: if you can picture it, we can probably make it. Almost nothing in our workshop is fixed. The motif, the colours, the cloth, the size, what goes in the box, how the box is finished - none of it is chosen off a page. It gets decided by talking to us.
Think of how you order food. The kitchen has everything it needs and whoever's cooking knows what they're doing, but what turns up on your table depends on what you say. Less chilli. Skip the onion. That one, but with paneer. You don't feel awkward asking. Our workshop is the same. Want the motif smaller, in madder instead of indigo? A table runner instead of a tote, six things in the hamper instead of three, your own logo in the border? Say so. That's genuinely all it takes.
The slow part is always the carving. A block is a piece of seasoned wood cut by hand, in reverse, by someone who knows exactly how deep a line has to sit before it prints cleanly on cotton. You can't hurry that by adding people to it. Every block for SRK was being cut new, so the carving bench set the speed for everything else. That's the honest trade with handwork: the thing that makes it feel personal is the same thing that takes the time. We said so upfront and planned around it.
What we skipped was making test pieces first. We usually do, because it catches problems before they multiply - but they'd been using ours for a year and knew the weight of the cloth and the way the print sits. There was nothing left for a test piece to tell them. So we went straight to printing, which gave us back close to two weeks. Out of all 425 hampers, not one came back. We didn't reprint a thing.
They were also a pleasure to deal with, which matters more than a production note usually admits. Quick to reply, actually excited about the craft rather than politely interested. You can feel it in the finished work. We started at the end of January and everything went out by mid-February.
Somewhere in the middle of it, something shifted for us. We'd always thought of ourselves as a small studio making things for people who already love this craft. Turns out we can also be who a company calls when it wants its gifting to mean something. They weren't buying block print, after all. They were buying something their team would actually keep instead of leaving in a drawer.
So if you're planning something similar, come to us earlier than you think you need to - carving wants four to six weeks, more in festival season. And don't turn up with a shortened list of what you assume is allowed. Turn up with what you actually want. Four hundred and twenty-five hampers started as one message about a laptop sleeve, and everything after that was just conversation.
Tell us what you'd like your people to keep, and we'll tell you honestly what it takes to make it.