Words by Vaani Bhala
Field Notes from India
The global design industry loves to speak about craft in the language of softness. Craft is described as feminine, intimate, emotional, ancestral. It is marketed through ideas of care, patience, and heritage. It is often photographed through women’s hands. And yet, when we look at who owns craft businesses, who sets prices, who controls distribution, and who receives authorship, the picture shifts dramatically. Craft may be feminised in language, but power in craft is overwhelmingly masculine. This is not a feeling. It is a structure.
"Craft is coded as feminine, but ownership is coded as authority."
Across South Asia, craft production happens largely in informal and home based environments. According to Women in Informal Employment Globalizing and Organizing, more than half of the world’s estimated one hundred million home based workers live in South Asia, and roughly eighty percent of them are women. This is not a marginal workforce. This is the backbone of the handmade economy. In India alone, there are approximately seventy four million home based workers, including around forty four million women. Nearly thirty percent of women’s employment in the country is home based. These are the women weaving rugs, embroidering textiles, stitching kantha, spinning yarn, finishing surfaces that later appear in luxury homes and international showrooms. Now look at where the money goes. WIEGO reports that home based workers are typically paid on a piece rate basis and often receive less than ten percent of the final sale price of the goods they produce. Less than ten percent. This is the economic truth beneath every romantic description of handmade luxury. If a rug sells for thousands, the woman who wove it is paid in hundreds or less. Ownership data makes the imbalance impossible to ignore. India’s Sixth Economic Census shows that only about thirteen point seven six percent of enterprises are run by women. In other words, women dominate the making, but men dominate the owning. This gap is not accidental. It is systemic.
Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in the world of rugs and textiles.
Handmade rugs sit at the centre of global luxury interiors. They are described as heirloom pieces, as anchors of space, as objects of cultural depth. They are also one of the most labour intensive craft forms in the world. Hand knotting takes months. Sometimes years.
In South Asia, a significant portion of this labour is performed by women. They knot, trim, and finish rugs from their homes or small workshops, often balancing this work alongside domestic labour. Yet when we look at the rug industry globally, ownership remains concentrated in multi generational firms, exporters, and studios that are overwhelmingly controlled by men.
The narrative credit follows ownership, not labour.
This pattern repeats across craft sectors. Kantha is spoken about as a feminine textile, rooted in women’s lives and domestic spaces. Yet the global trade in kantha is dominated by intermediaries and exporters who rarely share that identity. Embroidery is celebrated as women’s work, but embroidery businesses are rarely owned by women. Craft is feminised. Capital is not.
The language around craft makes this erasure easier. Women are described as artisans, makers, helpers, hands. Men are described as founders, directors, visionaries. One group produces. The other interprets, packages, and sells.
This is why the global handmade economy feels dishonest.
The industry celebrates women symbolically while excluding them structurally. It uses femininity as an aesthetic while denying women economic authority. It praises heritage while reproducing hierarchy.
And this is not limited to South Asia. Across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, women form a large share of craft labour while remaining underrepresented in enterprise ownership and brand leadership. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has repeatedly pointed out that women are present in creative labour but missing from decision making and profit sharing across creative economies.
Craft survives because women absorb its cost.
They work from home because formal work is inaccessible. They accept low pay because bargaining power is absent. They remain invisible because visibility threatens the system that depends on their silence.
The most uncomfortable truth is this. The global love affair with handmade objects is sustained by a workforce that is systematically denied ownership, authorship, and economic mobility.
If the design world truly valued craft, it would ask different questions. Who owns this business. Who sets the price. Who controls the narrative. Who benefits when this object is called luxury.
Until those questions are asked publicly, the language of heritage remains empty.
Craft does not need more admiration. It needs redistribution.