Vidisha Sarees

Our shop is located at W 1211 on the ground floor of the Surat Textile Market. If you’ve ever been to Ring Road, you know it’s a total maze of shops and people moving bundles of cloth. We are right in the thick of it. Every morning we open up and start unpacking the new arrivals that come in from the weavers. The space is filled with sarees from floor to ceiling, mostly stacked in boxes or wrapped in plastic to keep the dust off. It’s a lot of physical work, moving those heavy bundles around and showing different patterns to anyone who walks in. The light isn't the best in here, but we have some bright tubes so people can see the colors properly. We spend most of our day talking to other traders and drinking way too much tea. It gets really crowded during the festival seasons, and sometimes you can barely move in the aisles. We don't do much fancy advertising; people just know we are here on the ground floor. It is a noisy, dusty, and fast-paced place to work, but we are used to the rhythm of the market by now. Dealing with the traffic on Ring Road is probably the hardest part of the day. But once you are inside the market, it’s just about the fabric and making sure the orders are packed right for the customers.