My Creative Journey & Story
AMU has been an interesting journey of creativity, pivots and exploring my love for textiles and design. What has remained constant throughout is my love for color, minimalism, and influence of India and the Middle East in my design. I started my design career when I moved to the USA in 2016, from Bangalore, India.
My love for textiles started very young, when my mother and aunts would collect sarees that were hand embroidered or woven by artisans across India. As I grew up, I would love reading fashion magazines and learn everything I could about Indian textiles and the artistry behind it. When I moved to the USA in early 2016 along with my husband, I took this as my chance to pursue my wild childhood dream to create my own fashion brand. I focused on slow fashion printing techniques, such as block printing to create the vibrant prints and patterns on textiles, that I then used to create Made to Order garments.
During this journey, I won an award for the Most Innovative Designer at the Milwaukee Fashion Week 2017. I also became a mother, and due to health reasons, I had to close by store for 1.5 years.
When I restarted my business, I pivoted from a clothing brand, to a home décor brand exclusively working with block printed throw pillows, table linens and scarves. I expanded to ice dyeing and natural dyeing printing techniques on fabrics. I found a lot of success and passion in this new industry.
In April 2021, I had to temporarily close my business once again for the near future. As an immigrant, we are here on a visa, and visas have time limits. Once we crossed the time limit on our visa, we had to switch our visa category to stay on longer in the USA. In this visa switch, I temporarily lost my ability to earn an income and work. The paperwork finally came through in Spring '22.
This became the reason behind the second major pivot in my design career, blogging. Through my creative journey, I have realized I have a slightly different sense of style from the mainstream design aesthetic. And I have gathered a rather engaged community that enjoys my style. And although my business had to close, my ambition didn’t go away and I didn’t want to stop engaging with my community. Plus, I realized being creative made me ridiculously happy!
So, for this new phase in my creative journey. I started blogging to explain how to design homes with a mix of color, minimalism and influence of the culture you want to represent. I am teaching design hacks, tips and fun DIYs that one can do within their homes to make it truly reflective of their personality.
AMU 3.0 started on Aug 2022, after I gave birth to my second daughter. This time my business was the version of the business I dreamed of as a child. I started to work with the incredible and skilled artisans in India to manufacture my fabrics. I want to highlight the beautiful craftmanship of India and tell the stories of the people and regions that the artisans belong to.
So here I am, living my dream and creating new dreams and new goals to achieve.
And this is me <3
