Our first trip to India.

Some of you will know we recently went to India to go and visit a new factory and set up production over there. It’s a really exciting opportunity to work with a lovely fair trade factory, which puts a whole lot more than simply employing women who normally wouldn’t be employed in India, back into the community. We’re going to tell you more about them later down in the line in another video. This is more of a general experience video…which mostly involved driving around town in tuktuk’s and rickshaws and freaking the ruck out until we got to grips with the way traffic works in India.
Essentially, you can take everything you learnt about driving in the West and flip it! You know how when you approach a round-about you give way to traffic already on the round-about? No, that’s not how it works in India……it’s the car’s coming towards you responsibility NOT TO HIT YOU……What?!? There were times when we came out of a junction into oncoming traffic. And this was normal. Driving past bikes and scooters with not just someone on the back, whole families with small children (babies) squeezed in. Again. Normal. To cross the road, you just walk slowly, with purpose and the cars drive around you! Apparently this is in part due to the idea that you have a day to die, and when that day comes, it’s your day. So what you do in the lead up to that day sort of doesn’t matter.

During the trip we went to areas of Delhi that aren’t on the tourist trail, so we were a real sideshow, western, white, and bleach blonde. Not to mention reasonably tall. Staring isn’t considered rude over there, so no one felt the need to hide their curiosity, or taking pictures of us.

But that said, we did our fair share of staring. It was amazing seeing 5 people wedged onto a bike, watching someone cycle and deliver huge parcels of newly made clothing across town on their rickshaw, driving around with no seatbelt thinking we might just die.

Here’s an overexcited video of what we got up to and some pictures of the weird and wild things we saw.

LKLx   

 Crazy traffic which makes no sense yet sort of does by the end of your time there.

 Beautiful details on the architecture

 Outside our hotel on the main bazaar, all lit up and making me thing of Vegas

 Yep, that is laundry drying by the side of the road, loads of towels, from a hotel, probably washed in the river, which is super dirty and full of sewage. We prayed it wasn't our hotels towels.

 Delhi is dusty, and smoggy but there's some really lovely bits, despite being so crowed and hectic, there's something so free about it.

A little update....where we've been and where we're going.

There’s been a lot going on behind the scenes at LKL over the past few months, it’s affected a few things, including your orders, so we wanted to make sure that you all knew what had been going on and had an idea of what was to come and what we’re working on.

We had a lovely little boutique in the heart of Bristol, which we sadly had to shut at the end of November. We’re a much stronger brand online and the boutique was sadly quite restrictive on what we could do with our time. Now we’re back to being based in a studio we have a lot more time to get back to what we love doing, designing great clothes.

As we were shutting the shop and moving to the studio, our restock on our jeans was late. This was due to an issue in our supply chain which we now understand and have made sure we work around and allow time to stop there being a negative impact on deliveries.

Then it was Christmas.

And then…..we went to India!

You see, previously all of Lady K Loves clothing has been made in the UK. We felt really passionately that the quality and ethics were easier to manage producing in the same country as us. However we came across an option to work with a fair trade factory in India, which had been visited and vetted by a trusted friend. So we went over to check it out. In the two weeks we were there, we visited fabric suppliers, sourced some wonderful fabrics and prints, visited the factory, had samples made and fell in love with the wonderful kind people who worked there. The factory is very nice, we’ll be more tell you more about it soon, but rest assured we’re more than satisfied with the conditions the staff there work in. 

We also snuck a couple of days off in this beautiful beach in Goa, for a much overdue break. 

While we were there, we discovered that the internet connection out there is not what we’re used to in the UK. We had so many issues trying to be contactable and getting to our emails, so, we’re making sure that we take on a member of staff to train them up and make sure that the level of customer service you get is consistent. This is really important as we know how hard it can be buying online and we want to make it was easy as possible.

We’ve also kicked off a restock of our sold out sizes of Classic and Hug Me Baby jeans which are ready to order now with and ETA of 7^th March. We have confirmation that the fabric is at the factory and production has started so this date shouldn’t slip.

Other than that, we can’t wait to show you all of the wonderful things that will be in stock soon. LKLx