Maybe it’s the fact that she was once a journalist that makes Bandhini Homewear Design’s Tai Schaffler such a good interviewee. Or maybe it’s as simple as her passion for her business and the dying crafts of the people who hand make her products.
As an 18 year old, “small town Kiwi girl” Tai got a scholarship to study in Thailand, and her love affair with textiles began. “I would drive the other students nuts, fossiking through the Jim Thompson Silk stores. God I loved that silk! Still do,” she tells me. Her writing life started as a Christchurch correspondent for More Magazine.
She left journalism when Geraldine Sethi offered her a job in Perth to re-market and refurb her fashion business, Asaan. With a toddler and her husband in tow, Tai relocated to Perth and started traveling to India with her new boss. “I was hooked on textiles,” says Tai. “Not clothes but cloth for homes.” It wasn’t long before she saw the potential to open her own home textiles label.
These days she heads up Bandhini, now in its 20th year. Key to its success has been the longstanding relationship between the Schafflers and another family, in India. “I met Sangetta and Yuvraj Narain when I worked for Asaan and they were doing a stunning clothing collection called KALAKARI,” says Tai. “We were totally on the same wavelength of quality, cultural and handmade soft furnishings. That was it, I wasn’t going anywhere else! I adore them.”
Both families’ children have now have joined the business, with Tai’s son Sharm and the Narains’ sons Sharan and Karan, heading up the team in the USA. “They have finally got our gusto!” says Tai. “I think they are more business orientated than us. The next generation take it to the next level. They want to keep it on the same page ethically though, that’s important.”
