About us

Who are we?

Scrapshala is a women-led conscious Indian brand with a purpose of making premium environment-friendly alternatives available to everyone.

We are achieving this by reviving traditional Indian handicraft in a sustainable manner using the approach of upcycling

At Scrapshala, our core value is to ensure that every single person from makers, promoters to consumers is befitted in a positive manner!

Our products bring together pre-existing raw material, authentic artisanal skills, respectable livelihood opportunities and memorable experience to everyone who decides to own them!

Why we started?

Scrapshala started in 2016 with a service and product line that could solve the problem of overconsumption and help in minimization of waste being sent to landfills that adds to the environmental degradation.

We started becoming a solution by interlinking art, creativity and waste into innovative functional products that are good for you and good for environment too.

We are headquartered in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh and our work culture strictly promotes gender equality and is LGBTQ friendly

Our Journey

We started very humbly from the balcony of our house in the oldest living city of the world, Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, India.

Our first artisan was a wooden toy painter from Prajapati community of Banaras, Mr Munare Prajapati. We met him while buying vegetables on a winter morning. He had started selling vegetables as handicraft industry in Banaras was dying, the reason being shift in consumer behaviour towards machine made cheap copies.

Learning from him about the unreliability in handicraft industry as major reason for younger generations moving to odd jobs, we started digging more.

After lot of persuasion, Mr Munare agreed to work with us as a painter. We gave him few empty beer glass bottles to paint and after seeing the result, we found our very first product to show to the world.

Every month, we started adding more local artisans and increasing our product range.

In a year’s time, we were 8 artisan strong with more than 100 different products.

Our artisans and consumers both felt happy with the innovative and ethical product line.

By 2017, our vision, mission and goals got defined!

Shikha Shah

Founder

Vision

To make premium quality upcycled and sustainable products accessible to every conscious consumer

Mission

• To identify areas where plastic can be successfully replaced by sustainable alternatives
• To educate masses about sustainable and handmade products
• To ensure that our products while being made, used or discarded create minimum new scrap
• To create respectable livelihood opportunities and safe working space for 1000 artisans by 2025

Guiding Principles

In line with our Founder’ original vision, we want to develop a profitable model along with growth of local artisans associated with us and without compromising on product quality!

Developing innovative and highly functional products for our consumers that can bring maximum value for their money, will always remain our guiding principal.

Milestones achieved:

Innovative product line from more than 12 categories of waste material

Product design that generates minimum new non-biodegradable waste after discard

More than 1 lakh kg of waste upcycled into useful innovative product

More than 100 local Indian artisans empowered

Delivering products in more than 20 countries around the world