Startup Deep Dive : Okhai — the crafts brand with no funding round and no valuation

Okhai has never announced a funding round, never disclosed a valuation, and is not, in any legal sense, a startup — it is a trust. Yet in the seven months between March and October 2020, the number of rural women artisans actively selling through its platform went from 2,300 to 16,000, a scale-up most venture-backed marketplaces would call a breakout year, and one that Okhai itself says produced 67% annual growth in FY20.

The contradiction is the story. A brand built inside a corporate social-responsibility trust out-executed a crisis that broke the supply chains of far better-funded competitors. Two decades before that, its origin was not a garage or a hackathon but a drought that wiped out farm income for tribal and pastoral women in a corner of coastal Gujarat that most of India cannot place on a map: Okhamandal.

Quick facts

What they do

Okhai sells handcrafted apparel, home décor and accessories made by rural women artisans, to urban and increasingly online Indian shoppers who want ethically produced, artisanal products with a documented social story attached to each piece. The catalogue runs from kurtas, dupattas, stoles and hand-embroidered sarees to cushion covers, jewellery, jute bags and home linen, produced across more than 15 craft traditions — Rabari and Aari embroidery, mirror work, block printing, Kalamkari, Madhubani painting, Chikankari, Dokra metalwork, macramé, silver filigree, basket weaving and jute craft among them, sourced from artisan clusters spanning more than 20 Indian states.

The origin

The insight behind Okhai was not a market gap; it was a survival response. A multi-year drought through the 1990s devastated farming income across the Okhamandal region of Saurashtra, Gujarat, near Tata Chemicals’ Mithapur plant. In 1995, a team from the Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development surveyed 42 villages around that plant, looking for alternative livelihoods for women from tribal and pastoral communities who had lost their agricultural income. What they found was a craft already in every household: intricate Rabari and appliqué embroidery, practised for generations but never sold beyond the community. Ramiben, an artisan from Arambhada village, is credited with mobilising the first group of women to turn that craft into a saleable product, with TCSRD providing training, design input and a route to market. The programme ran informally for years before it was given a name in 2002 — Okhai, after the region itself — and a formal legal structure in 2008, when it was registered as the Okhai Centre for Empowerment, a trust with artisans as its members.

The struggle years

Okhai’s early years were built on the same fragility that created it. Its first retail outlet did not open until 6 years after the founding survey — a store inside Himalaya Mall in Ahmedabad, inaugurated on 4 July 2008, the same year the trust was formalised — meaning the collective sold through local markets, exhibitions and word of mouth for over a decade before it had a single storefront. Growth in that period was arithmetic, not exponential: the collective grew from roughly 350 to 500 women at its 2002 start (accounts differ on the exact figure) to around 900 artisans by the mid-2010s, and revenue is estimated to have only reached about ₹1.15 crore in FY2014-15, doubling to ₹2.3 crore by FY2016-17 — tiny numbers for an initiative that by then spanned three states.

The second, sharper crisis arrived with COVID-19. Okhai’s artisans had built their livelihoods around supplying physical retail stores and exhibitions with a steady, if modest, order flow; the March 2020 lockdown erased that channel overnight. The number of artisans actively transacting through Okhai’s own platform fell to roughly 2,300 — a shrinkage, not the growth the brand talks about publicly today. On the occasion of the International Day of Rural Women in October 2020, Okhai launched a dedicated helpline (registered on WhatsApp) so artisans in remote regions could report unsold stock, group size and location, and be routed to new buyers, a response to what Kirti Poonia, then head of Okhai, described as a need to “safeguard the talented and skilled artisans in all forms of art” during the pandemic.

The turning point

The pivot that followed is the closest thing Okhai has to a single defining event. In early 2020, as the pandemic shut down physical retail, Okhai converted itself from a product-led brand that manufactured and stocked its own inventory into a marketplace running on a dropship model, onboarding new artisan groups directly onto its platform rather than routing everything through its own warehouse. The company added roughly one new artisan group every week through the rest of that year, taking the total to 85 new groups onboarded within twelve months.

• Before: about 2,300 artisans actively represented on Okhai’s platform in March 2020, entirely dependent on physical retail and exhibition orders that had just stopped.
• After: about 16,000 artisans represented by October 2020, rising to more than 24,000 artisan groups enabled to sell through the platform, per Okhai’s own account published in August 2021.
• Result: Okhai recorded 67% annual growth in FY20 — by its own description, its best year yet — with a separate account putting FY2020-21 growth at 68%, a figure close enough that it may describe the same period rather than a second consecutive jump.
• Follow-through: on 25 October 2020, Okhai opened its first physical store since the 2008 Ahmedabad outlet — a 950-square-foot space in a heritage building in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda art district — betting that the pandemic-era online audience would also want a place to browse in person.

The money behind it

Okhai has no capitalisation table because it has never sold equity. Its only institutional backer, across its entire history, is its own parent: the Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development, the CSR arm that Tata Chemicals Ltd has run since 1980. TCSRD does not invest in Okhai in exchange for ownership or returns; it funds a livelihood programme, and any commercial surplus the trust generates is reinvested in artisan wages, training and design rather than distributed to shareholders.

• Sole funder: Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development, backed by Tata Chemicals Ltd’s CSR budget — not a venture investor, and not compensated with equity or a financial return.
• No disclosed funding rounds: no seed, Series A or later round appears in any public record found for Okhai; it has not been covered by venture-funding trackers as a funded company.
• No disclosed valuation: because there has been no external investment, there is no market-set valuation to report, reported or otherwise.
• Distribution partners, not investors: Okhai has listed its products on Tata CLiQ, Myntra, Jaypore, Amazon and Nykaa since around 2015 — commercial retail tie-ups that expand reach but carry no equity stake.

How it makes money

Money comes in from three channels: direct sales on okhai.org, Okhai’s own flagship store in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda, and listings on third-party marketplaces and stockists including Tata CLiQ, Myntra, Jaypore, Amazon and Nykaa. Online sales make up the large majority of the mix — about 90% of total sales, per a 2023 account of the business.

• Money in: direct-to-consumer sales on okhai.org; in-store sales at the single Kala Ghoda outlet; wholesale and marketplace listings on Tata CLiQ, Myntra, Jaypore, Amazon and Nykaa.
• Costs out: artisan wages, which range from about ₹500 a month for light, occasional work up to ₹20,000 or more a month for skilled, high-output embroiderers; raw material and fabric procurement; a central processing hub in Ahmedabad that handles quality checks, washing, packaging and barcoding before dispatch; design and marketing overheads.
• Where the margin sits: Okhai has not published a gross margin or take rate. Its stated model prices products to cover fair artisan wages first, which structurally caps how thin or fat the margin can be compared with a mass-manufactured apparel brand of similar size.
• What people get wrong: it is easy to assume Okhai is a pure charity giving products away, or conversely a large commercial fashion label; it is neither. It has run as a real e-commerce and retail business since 2014, with a professional design and marketing team, while remaining structurally a non-profit trust that does not raise equity or report to shareholders.

The numbers

Okhai does not publish standard annual revenue and profit-and-loss statements the way a company would. The figures below are the only ones found in public reporting, and the gaps are real — not omissions.

• FY2016-17 revenue of about ₹2.3 crore included roughly ₹1 crore of online sales, itself up 150% on the prior year, as the brand’s e-commerce base was still young.
• No absolute rupee revenue figure for any year after FY2016-17 has been found in public reporting; a 2023 profile of the business states plainly that Okhai does not disclose its exact revenue.
• Profit or loss has never been disclosed for any year; as a trust, Okhai is not required to and does not report a distributable profit figure the way a private company would.

Where the money comes from

Okhai’s business splits along three lines: channel, geography of production, and craft category. The surprise is how concentrated the physical retail footprint still is despite the scale of the artisan network behind it.

• Channel split: about 90% of sales happen online (okhai.org plus marketplace listings), against roughly 10% through Okhai’s single physical store and periodic exhibitions, per a 2023 account.
• Production geography: Gujarat (Okhamandal and Mithapur — the founding cluster, working largely with Ahir, Rabari, Vaghar and Charan communities); West Bengal (Haldia, jute craft, added around 2010); Uttar Pradesh (Babrala, karjobi embroidery, added around 2011); plus artisan groups across more than 20 states drawn in during the 2020 platform expansion.
• Craft and category split: apparel (kurtas, dupattas, stoles, sarees) sits alongside home décor and linen, and accessories including jewellery — spread across more than 15 named craft techniques, from Rabari embroidery and block printing to Dokra metalwork and Chikankari.
• The surprise: the retail footprint is a single 950-square-foot store in Mumbai, opened only in October 2020 — twelve years after the brand’s first (and since discontinued from public mention) Ahmedabad outlet — meaning nearly all of a 25,000-plus-artisan network is monetised through a website and a handful of third-party marketplace listings rather than owned stores.

The risks

• Single-funder dependency. Okhai’s only institutional backer is its own parent’s CSR arm. Corporate CSR spending is discretionary and reviewed annually, and Okhai’s own disclosed revenue (about ₹2.3 crore as of FY2016-17, with nothing since) is small relative to a network reported at 25,000 to 30,000 artisans — leaving little independent commercial buffer if TCSRD’s funding priorities were to shift.
• Quality consistency at scale. Producing through thousands of home-based artisans, spread across more than 15 crafts and 20-plus states, creates a documented operational challenge: a 2024 case study of the business explicitly names “ensuring consistent quality with dispersed artisans” as a live challenge for the model, alongside building trust with artisans around new designs and methods.
• Slow production against fast demand. Okhai’s own account of its process says a collection can take anywhere from 8 days to 2.5 years to complete, depending on the craft’s complexity — a lead time that sits awkwardly against the faster restocking cycles of organised ethnic-wear retailers and online fashion marketplaces competing for the same conscious-consumer spend.

The takeaway

Okhai’s real lesson is not about crafts or CSR specifically; it is about what happens when an organisation scales its headcount and its mission faster than it scales its financial disclosure and commercial infrastructure. A network that grew from roughly 2,300 to more than 16,000 active artisans in seven months, and is now described as 25,000 to 30,000 strong, has clearly solved for reach. What is harder to find in the public record is a matching scale-up in revenue reporting, margin discipline or store footprint — the boring plumbing that turns a good mission into a durable business. For any founder building something with a social mission at its core, the transferable point is this: growth in the number of people you serve is not the same evidence of health as growth in what the business actually earns and discloses, and the gap between the two eventually has to be answered, one way or another.

Frequently asked questions

Is Okhai a startup or a nonprofit?

Neither in the conventional sense. Okhai is a brand run by the Okhai Centre for Empowerment, a trust registered in 2008 under the Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development. It operates a real e-commerce and retail business but reinvests any surplus rather than distributing profit or raising equity capital.

Who owns or controls Okhai?

Okhai sits under the Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development, the CSR arm of listed company Tata Chemicals Ltd (NSE: TATACHEM). There are no external shareholders or investors.

How many artisans does Okhai work with?

The number has grown sharply and is reported differently across periods: about 900 in the mid-2010s, roughly 2,300 in March 2020, about 16,000 by October 2020, and 25,000 to 30,000 across more than 15 crafts and 20-plus states in accounts published between 2023 and the present.

Has Okhai raised venture funding or reached a valuation?

No public record found in this research shows Okhai raising external funding or being assigned a market valuation. Its only backer is its own parent CSR trust, and no valuation, reported or otherwise, appears in available sources.

Where can you buy Okhai products?

Directly at okhai.org, at its single physical store in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda district (opened October 2020), and through marketplace listings on Tata CLiQ, Myntra, Jaypore, Amazon and Nykaa.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Tata group, “A Brand With A Soul”, tata.com, accessed September 2026
• Tata group, “Taking Okhai Online”, tata.com, August 2021
• Tata Chemicals, “‘Okhai’ — nationwide first retail outlet inaugurated in Ahmedabad”, tatachemicals.com press release, July 2008
• Tata Chemicals Society for Rural Development, “Okhai”, tcsrd.org, accessed September 2026
• Business Standard, “Okhai sets up helpline to support Covid-hit rural artisans find new markets”, October 2020
• YourStory, “How this NGO-turned-ecommerce business grew from 2,300 to 24,000 artisans during the pandemic”, smbstory, accessed September 2026
• 30stades, “How Okhai handcrafted a success story with 25,000 rural women artisans and one e-commerce platform”, November 2023
• NuSocia, “Weaving Change: The Okhai Story of Empowering Women and Reviving Traditional Crafts”, nusocia.com, accessed September 2026
• Markhub24, “The Women Who Saved Their Craft — And How Okhai Took It to the World”, accessed September 2026
• Okhai, “The Okhai Story: Craft, Community and Change”, okhai.org, accessed September 2026
• Okhai, “About Okhai: Empowering Rural Artisans of India”, okhai.org, accessed September 2026
• Tickertape / Trendlyne, Tata Chemicals Ltd (TATACHEM) listing details, accessed September 2026

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