Walking the walk and not just talking the talk

Every new business starts out with a need that has to be fulfilled, it is the same story with KAPDAA – The Offcut Company. I got the idea for KAPDAA when I visited my Mum in Mumbai, on completion of my MA. Right there in her studio, the light bulb moment happened. I saw tons of lovely fabric being thrown away and that I couldn’t see all the beautiful fabric go to waste. I then sat with the head designer at my mother’s workshop and cut a rectangular piece of fabric, which was then pasted together to create a beautiful bookmark. This was the first offcut product – the beginning of a new chapter in my life.

At KAPDAA, every piece matters.

We actively work with fashion and interior designers, textile weavers, and mills to try turn their beautiful offcuts, end of rolls, and other excess materials into unique and sustainable, branded products – notebooks, eye masks, luggage tags, passport holders and many more – thus saving them from going to landfill straight away, and giving them a new lease of life.

Our strong belief in sustainability and the drive to take the initiative forward has resulted in collaborations with over 250 brands, like Selfridges, Halston Heritage, Alice + Olivia, Holland & Sherry, Erdem and more, for whom we’ve created beautiful products out of their unused materials. We even managed to find use for the smallest pieces of unused material – staying 100% true to our motto. While doing so we have managed to reuse over 5000 meters of fabric offcuts, and that’s in just 2.5 years!

Following our success, we’ve come across two challenges in two completely contrasting spaces:

• Brands: With large volumes of offcuts of course, who are looking to put their excessive fabric to good use. They couldn’t use all that products that would’ve been made with the offcuts, and didn’t want them to go to waste either.
• Consumers: Increase in demand for our sustainable products from consumers. We’ve had so many people come up to us and tell us “Hey I saw you on Instagram, I love what you’re doing! Where can we buy your products?”

With these two challenges ahead of us, we came up with one big and exciting solution: KAPDAA- The Offcut Company is proud to have launched its new sustainable E-commerce website in November 2018: https://www.kapdaa.com/individual/

With the help of our new venture, we are now able to process a significantly larger volume of offcuts, thus saving bigger amounts from being discarded. Every process done to create the products on our website falls in place with the ethos of the company: The packaging for the products has been changed to muslin bags from plastic ones; Soot, which is made from the remainder waste from the factories, is used as ink to print in our notebooks; and even the fact that we employ and promote traditional crafts like screen printing and hand binding: Traditional, sustainable and ethical.

So this is it – the realization of my dream – a website that brings you upcycled quality products from a range of designers.

This is us!

I hope you enjoy browsing and shopping our amazing products and help us continue to share our offcut story.