To eco fashionistas across the world, Jugaad’s unique handmade recycled products symbolize masti, magic and colour.
But Jugaad is much more than a funky brand. Jugaad is the fund raising arm of Karm Marg, the children’s home that seeks to empower vulnerable youths with livelihood skills. When customers buy Jugaad’s cool patchwork, innovative stationery and whacky clothes, they are helping to contribute a whopping fifty per cent of Karm Marg’s expenses.
Jugaad also stands for the quest for innovative uses of waste products. Using waste newspaper, bottles, textiles, CDs and more, Jugaad creates and markets a vast range of handcrafted and eco-friendly products. This approach of creating immediate solutions from insufficient resources using creative ingenuity is what we call, the truly Indian ‘jugaad’.
How it all began…
Jugaad began creating products from recycled materials in 1997 as a part of Karm Marg, a Delhi based children’s home and organisation working with disadvantaged kids. Our first product line was newspaper bags. At first, when Karm Marg members lived near the New Delhi Railway Station, these were made from the newspapers that commuters left behind in trains and platforms. Thanks to the support of Sunny, Meeta and Gurpreet from People Tree (http://peopletreeonline.com/home.html), who provided us an outlet for our products, we successfully sold our first batch of paper bags, using the profits to support Karm Marg and taking our first step towards making our association financially independent.
At that time, the products were made and sold under the label of Karm Marg. Later, as sales grew, Karm Marg’s product line needed to become an independent entity. Thus, Jugaad was born in 2004.
Though the profits from Jugaad are still used to support Karm Marg, the brand is now an independent creative manufacturer of products designed to compete in the general market, and appeal not only to those who would buy them out of appreciation of the work of Karm Marg.