It was the summer of 1969. Kutch was ravaged by drought for the fourth year in a row. Food and hope were hard to find.

Chanda Shroff visited Dhaneti village in Kutch to help run a free kitchen. The village women were reluctant to accept charity. But in the exquisite hand embroidery displayed on their clothing, she saw a way to enable them to earn a sustainable and dignified livelihood.

This was the beginning of Shrujan (meaning Creativity in Sanskrit).

Today over two thousand craftswomen, spread over a sixty six remote villages across Kutch, are part of the Shrujan family.

Our craftswomen work from home. Our production team ensures that the fabrics and threads reach them wherever they are, right at their doorstep. The women do not have to pay for the materials. But we pay them their fair dues for their skill and their time, as soon as they have completed the embroidery.

The embroidered textiles are then fashioned into high quality apparel, accessories and lifestyle products, and marketed through our shops and Shrujan exhibitions.

It has been an extraordinary adventure - and one that has changed all our lives.

Shrujan's founder Chanda Shroff was honoured with the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2006.

The income earned from embroidery has helped the craftswomen to secure a better future for themselves and their families.

Our craftswomen are proud to use the skill in their hands to stand tall on their feet. Their passion for excellence is what makes Shrujan embroidery like no other, anywhere in the world.

In 1997 Shrujan launched the Design Centre on Wheels project to revive forgotten embroidery designs and create new interpretations of traditional designs.

Over the next five-and-a-half years, three generations of craftswomen - grandmothers, mothers and young girls-worked side by side with local and urban designers to create large-size textile panels representing the different embroidery styles of Kutch.

More than a thousand embroidered panels were created. And they created embroidery history. They were taken in a specially designed bus to all the villages in Kutch, where they served as a tremendous source of pride and inspiration to craftswomen of all ages.

Our hope is that the new designs will help keep the craft alive for at least a hundred years.

Our most ambitious project so far is the Living and Learning Design Centre (LLDC). We hope it will do for the other crafts of Kutch what we have been able to achieve for hand embroidery.

Located on a nine-acre campus in Ajrakhpur, LLDC is envisioned as a multi-dimensional crafts educations and resource center. An international-standard Crafts Museum, inaugurated in January 2016, comprises four galleries for display, a crafts studio, an auditorium, and a hands-on gallery for visitors to try their hand at some of the crafts.

An initiative titled Pride and Enterprise is an integral part of the Living and Learning Design Centre. This is an effort to research and document the crafts of Kutch, to capture the memories and lives of its people through audio-video-photo-song recordings.