#SankalpChangemakers: Dr. Megha Phansalkar Is Turning Handicraft Into a Supply Chain
By the time a Tisser jacket reaches a hanger, it has already traveled across India, through at least three states, without a single mass factory touching it. Dr. Megha Phansalkar held up that jacket at the Sankalp Bharat Summit 2025 to explain how Tisser actually works.
By Punita Maheshwari
The ikat is from Andhra Pradesh. The kantha embroidery was done four hundred miles east, in Birbhum. The stitching happened last, in a women’s center in Maharashtra.
Dr. Megha Phansalkar built it this way on purpose, choosing it over the factory route, and she’ll tell you so, holding it up like evidence: pattern cutting, stitching, embroidery, fabric, all of it done in-house, start to finish, by Tisser.
This differentiation is the business model. Artisans keep their earnings instead of losing them before the product is even finished.
Tisser calls itself a hybrid model, the binding link between the creator and the consumer. That means skipping the shortcuts a normal supply chain would take. With no factory sourcing and no bulk manufacturing, every product runs through that same in-house model.
Tisser at a glance Founded: October 2015, with about 100 artisans Today: 10,000+ artisans, 50+ clusters, 18 states, 8 regional hubs Reach in 2025-26: more than 78,000 lives touched, 100,000+ families connected Model: in-house, start to finish, no factory sourcing, no bulk manufacturing
Where the Money Disappears
She calls it the biggest problem in the artisan sector anywhere in the world right now, and locates it squarely in India, which accounts for 60 percent of the globe’s handicraft output.
“The value chain is fragmented, crowded, and missing the market linkage, supply chain, and institutions it would take to run properly,” she says. “That means sitting directly inside the production chain instead of standing beside it.”
Every product moves through that same chain: interiors, apparel like Indo-Western wear, sarees, dupattas, Treasure Toys (an eco-friendly children’s line built around DIY kits, ten of them so far), a soft toy, or a t-shirt made from plastic bottles collected off the streets of Mumbai. The network of artisans behind all of it is deliberately mixed. It includes tribal communities, sex workers, differently abled craftspeople, and families three generations into the same craft, working across both rural and urban clusters. It’s spread across 18 states, moving through that network before it becomes something a customer in Europe or America can buy.
The problem of artisans losing out to mass production and cut wages is something Phansalkar discovered firsthand. She spent years inside India’s National Rural Livelihood Mission, working with the World Bank on water, sanitation, and rural development, moving between clusters where she kept running into the same pattern: real craftsmanship, and no route to a fair market for it.
There was a second problem sitting underneath the first one, quieter but just as corrosive. Traditional craft doesn’t survive on nostalgia alone. The techniques have to keep up with how people actually live for the craft to stay relevant. Phansalkar’s answer to both problems has stayed the same:
“Mobilize artisans to strengthen local supply, and kill the middle layer by building a value chain that runs straight from maker to buyer.”
From a Hundred Hands
In October 2015, Tisser started with about 100 artisans. The 18 states aren’t a single kind of place, and neither are the people in them. Eight regional hubs carry dedicated staff and long-term cluster development: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and Bihar. Each hub is really a craft in disguise. Odisha means Sambalpuri handloom and Pattachitra. Chhattisgarh means Kosa silk. Maharashtra means Warli. Andhra Pradesh means Kalamkari and so on.
The geography isn’t incidental. It’s picked around the kind of art each region can put out.
On these grounds, Tisser has built blockchain-backed traceability meant to let a product’s story travel with it: which artisan made it, which cluster it came from, what technique is at work in the stitching. Three physical spaces make the model tangible in a way a supply chain diagram never could. Tisser runs two craft villages, called Rangotsav, one in Mandavane, Karjat, the other in Wada, Palghar, where artisans live and work in residence and visitors can walk straight into the process instead of just buying the result. The third is PunarSutra, a textile recovery initiative in Navi Mumbai, built with the Ministry of Textiles and SBI Foundation, employing around 100 women to turn post-consumer fabric waste back into usable material.
Crossing Borders
That map is starting to cross borders. Tisser is working toward an MOU covering seven countries across South Asia, extending the model beyond India. Her own reasoning for it is straightforward:
“The South Asian region holds a concentration of craft heritage that’s genuinely sought after by a global audience, and right now nothing connects it the way Tisser connects India’s clusters.”
None of it is meant to look like charity.
“Buy the product, and the proceeds support the art and the artisan behind it,” she says.
What One Loom Adds Up To
By the most recent figures Tisser has published, the 2025-26 financial year touched more than 78,000 lives, working through a network of over 10,000 artisans across more than 50 clusters, with more than 100,000 families connected to the model in some form. Lives, artisans, and families aren’t the same unit, and Tisser doesn’t pretend they are.
The recognition has followed, and recently, at speed. In the 2025-26 cycle of the Desi Dhaakad Social Impact Awards, Tisser Artisans Trust, led by Phansalkar, won the Cultural Heritage category, for its work in indigenous art and craft revival. In 2025, Phansalkar was also named to the Meaningful Business 100, a global recognition of purpose-driven leaders chosen from more than 900 nominations across 86 countries. That same year, she won the UNIMO Rangoli Award for Top Woman Achiever, recognizing her and Tisser’s work around women’s empowerment and artisan livelihoods, and Tisser took Outstanding Contribution Towards Empowering Women at the 3rd Asia’s Leadership Awards, for its work with rural artisans and women. And in August 2026, CEO India Magazine ran a cover feature on the decade since Tisser’s founding, tracing its growth from a hundred artisans to a network the magazine now counts in the tens of thousands, spread across eight regional hubs and a wider footprint of eighteen states in all.
In their own words Ranjana Murli, khadi weaver: recognition is what carries the art and the artisan all the way to the customer. Uma, wooden toy maker: “I have a better life now,” and takes pride in supporting her family with it. Poonam, bamboo artisan: wants her sons to learn the same craft, so they can stand on their own.
That’s the real measure of what Phansalkar built. Not a jacket that traveled three states. A system built so that the person who made it never has to wonder where the rest of its value went.
[Editor’s note: Tisser was one of the nominees in the Creative Economy award at Sankalp Bharat 2025.]
