Our Journey

Looms to Rooms exists to close the distance between conscious consumers in North America and the skilled artisans around the world. We seek out and curate high-quality, ethically sourced handmade goods that sustain communities, honor traditional craftsmanship, and tread lightly on the earth. Every purchase is an invitation: to buy with intention.

Our Core Values

Artisan First: We invest directly in our makers by purchasing inventory upfront every quarter, ensuring their financial security.
Transparency: We connect every customer to the story behind their product, including the artisans, their community, and the values it represents.
Uncompromising Sustainability: We hold ourselves and our partners to the highest environmental standards, from production to delivery, with no shortcuts and no greenwashing.

Ayesha, Toby, Solomon, and Raphael

I spent over twenty years in corporate America. New York City gave me a seat at the table, partnering with and working alongside some of the sharpest minds at Citi Bike, Alphabet's LinkNYC, and Amazon. But every day felt like a checklist: one for work, one for family, and one for vacation (for which I was usually too tired to enjoy it). I knew this was not what living well meant. In May 2025, I decided to leave the corporate world. Not knowing what I wanted to do next, I focused on myself and my family.

I had time to meditate regularly, read about wellness, and learn many recipes. I rebuilt my sleep, exercise, and meals around intention rather than habit. During this time, I found a real gap: my options for sustainable, well-made home goods were very limited, even across big retailers. I wanted to reinvent my space, and honestly, myself along with it, starting with redecorating my own home, including my kids' rooms.

When I started looking for the pieces I actually wanted, I ran into the same wall twice: several vendors outside the US would only sell wholesale, and others simply couldn't ship to the US at all. To furnish my own minimalist home, I ended up paying a premium directly to two suppliers just to get two kanthas, the soft, hand-stitched blankets made from layered cotton cloth. That was the moment I decided to build the access I couldn't find: a way for North American consumers to reach these makers directly.

To shift how normalized synthetic materials have become in our homes, I chose to elevate artisans creating exquisite pieces from natural materials as my next project. Natural fibers breathe, wear better, and biodegrade. Many synthetic alternatives shed microplastics with every wash and persist in the environment for decades. That gap between what we think of as healthy living and what we actually put on our bodies and in our homes is enormous, and almost nobody is closing it. In search of better fabrics and more functional, urban-living-friendly goods, I sought out specific makers producing genuinely high-quality work. My intention was to learn from them. But after meeting them, I decided to launch Looms to Rooms. I'd like you to meet them too.

I went to Bangladesh to see it for myself, and visited three artisan groups in person.

The first was Artisan Hut, founded in 2002 by Monju Haque after years in fair trade and social work. Watching his artisans hand-weave, block-print, and embroider, I understood exactly what he'd built: not charity, but economic independence. Today, more than 250 artisans across rural Bangladesh earn twice as much as they'd have if they'd given up their craft for a power loom.

The second was Basha Boutique, founded by Robin Seyfert, an American who moved to Bangladesh in 2006 to work with the Mennonite Central Committee on HIV awareness; that work led her to women aging out of prostitution with nowhere to turn. She opened a training program expecting to fill one class and got 500 more names on the waitlist. When the women she trained couldn't find employment anywhere else, she built the company to employ them herself. Basha now employs around 120 Bengali women, and runs a daycare for 135 children and a training and rehabilitation program for another 30, across five cities. Kantha, the quilting technique at the center of their work, takes old, discarded saris and stitches them into something new by hand; as Robin puts it, each artisan who transforms the worn cloth is rebuilding their own life at the same time. Most Basha pieces come embroidered with the artisan's name, so buying one means reading her story too.

The third was Living Blue, in a bamboo atelier in Goalpara, a farming village in Rangpur. It began as a CARE Bangladesh project to revive Indigofera tinctoria, the native indigo plant, and train artisans across the region in kantha quilting alongside Japanese shibori tie-dye. When USAID pulled funding from projects worldwide, Living Blue was hit too, and 250 artisans lost their work overnight. The community came together to form a cooperative instead of letting the craft disappear, and Anowarul Haq, who had led the CARE program, saw it through so the artisans could keep working independently. Seeing natural dye done at that level of skill, right after the community had fought to keep it alive, was the moment "pure product" stopped being a marketing phrase for me. Galeries Lafayette in Paris now carries their work, which tells you everything about the quality.

Weaving Point I found afterward, through research rather than the Bangladesh trip; it's based in Tanzania, not Bangladesh, and the story pulled me in the same way. Founder Comfort Shangali Kenneth started it in 2017 to train young Tanzanians who couldn't continue their education, covering food, housing, and a stipend so nothing stood between them and a livelihood. Their cotton is locally sourced, zero-emission, and fully traceable, and 2% of every sale goes toward funding girls' education.

The wellness side of Looms to Rooms came from my community and like-minded people in Brooklyn. Terra Wellness, led by Dr. Choi, was a key part of that. I met her during my yoga practice, and her support helped me showcase some of Looms to Rooms' early products. Her guidance on lifestyle approaches to treat root causes rather than symptoms is unparalleled. She has magic fingers :-). NAKDBODI, founded by Ashley after her own struggles with allergies, asthma, and eczema, makes minimalist skincare with no fillers and no fragrance for skin like mine. Also in Brooklyn. Both are natural sources of nourishment, and partnered with Looms to Rooms to support each other in our community.

That's how Looms to Rooms came to be. Not a business plan or a checklist.

With much love, Ayesha <3

What's Next

We're just beginning. Over the next few months, we plan to attend trade shows to connect face-to-face with more artisan groups. I also intend to visit Tanzania and Sri Lanka on sourcing trips to discover more handmade, handloom products to bring back. Additionally, we're eager to include more social enterprises in the Looms to Rooms family. We're also working on a project we believe is important: measuring the emissions and environmental benefits we avoid by choosing handmade, handloom, all-natural, organic materials over synthetic, mass-produced options. This way, "conscious consumer" is no longer just a feeling but a measurable number. Sign up for our newsletter to get updates as we reach each milestone.