Vincent Van Gogh

At AGAATI, we truly believe in this philosophy and love nature for the abundant gifts she pours on us. To show our love and respect we take great care in selecting our fabrics, building relationships with our suppliers, spending time with them to learn about their ecosystems and challenges so that we can bring the highest quality to life in our beautiful designs. In this process our partners also learn to adopt eco-friendly practices to adopt. 

Our approach of sustainably sourcing and using raw materials has three key dimensions.

Natural fibre: We focus on using bio degradable natural fibres like cotton, hemp, silk, viscose and wool. Within these, we work with suppliers to find one of a kind, unique fabrics that provide soft luxurious feel for the body while also being breathable for the skin and harmless to the environment. Hand weaved textile is used in almost 50% of our design. 

Zero waste philosophy: An integral part of our design philosophy evolved studying zero waste design methods, then we took it beyond. We start with a philosophy of making garments that are timeless, desirable and of highest quality to last a lifetime. Then in our making process, we avoid using wasteful methods such as bias cuts, we-reuse left over cut pieces into embroidery giving a second life to the fabric pieces and use leftover dead stock fabrics.

Zero toxic chemicals: Dyeing of fabrics is one of many ways fashion impacts environment. While dying, we try to use azo free dyes that have the removal of  metallic component, which can create a textile-induced chemical sensitivity, or worse. Natural dyes is used in hand painted designs. We are constantly exploring methods to find desired colors in natural dyes that is scalable 

On being Vegan: We thought long and did a lot of research before deciding not to be vegan yet. Being vegan was turning out to mean that we either use polyesters (petroleum-derived fibers), or we restrict the use within natural fibers, or we invest in R&D to find ways to create new natural fabrics that are vegan. Being an early stage startup we have limited resources for R&D but we have it in our ambition to eliminate all animal use. As of right now, we do not use any leather products. Amongst animal products, we only use silks and wools where we carefully select suppliers and types of fabrics, going down to humanely raised Alpaca wool in California and Matka Silk from waste mulberry silk yarns in India. Peace silk is also used but is not available in quantities desired for scalability. Our research will continue.