Srinagar · Jammu & Kashmir
We cut fourteen pieces, and we can tell you where the cloth came from
AimsCraft is a Kashmiri clothing house with four counters and nothing else: upper wear, bottom wear, outerwear, and the winter wear this valley is actually built for. We buy cloth off named hand looms in Anantnag, Kupwara and Gurez, cut and stitch every piece in our own Srinagar workroom, print the weight and the fibre on the label instead of the word premium, and alter the fit free for as long as you own the garment.
At a glance
The whole shop, in four numbers
- Pieces
- 14
- Counters
- 4
- Order to dispatch
- 24 hr
- Verified reviews
- 1,557
Six above the waist, three below, two jackets, three for winter. There is no page two, and no fifteenth piece until one is worth making.
Upper wear, bottom wear, outerwear, winter wear. Every piece sits in one of them, and we cut for all four ourselves.
For a shirt or a tee off the shelf. Trousers we are hemming take three to four working days, and a hand-finished overcoat three.
Averaging 4.6 across the fourteen. Every one is tied to a real order, and the critical ones stay up.
Why only fourteen
A short rail is the only honest one
Hand-loomed wool is one of the most faked textiles in the country, and a mill-woven tweed sold as handloom is almost impossible to catch in a photograph. Cloth goes out on words — pure wool, premium, luxury — that mean nothing because nobody defines them.
The only defence a buyer has is a seller who can be checked. That is expensive: it means buying the cloth off the loom, paying the weaver by the piece while the work is still on it, cutting on your own blocks, and knowing the person whose name goes on the inside label. You cannot do it across four hundred lines. We can do it across fourteen.
So the rail is not short because we are starting out. It is short because fourteen is the largest number of pieces we can still answer questions about on the phone.
How it reaches you
Four steps, and a name at every one
Nothing here passes through a wholesaler. That is the only reason we can tell you who wove the cloth, who stitched the piece, and what they were paid for it.
- We buy the piece, not the offcut
- Tweed comes off pit-treadle looms in Anantnag, where a weaver lays down about three metres in a working day. Pattu is handspun and woven in Kupwara, cardigans are knitted in Gurez, and all of it is paid by the piece within seven days of coming off the loom or the needles rather than at the end of a season.
- One rise, one armhole, across the rail
- Every pair of bottoms is cut on the same rise, so the waist behaves the same way whichever pair you reach for. Shirts and jackets run S to XXL on one regular block, labelled by finished chest rather than by a letter that means something different in every shop.
- Canvassed by hand, shrunk before cutting
- Wool cloth is milled and decatised, and cotton is sanforised, before a pattern goes near it, so the piece does not move on you afterwards. Jacket fronts are half-canvassed with a pad-stitched horsehair chest piece and no fusible interlining anywhere.
- Left long, and altered free
- Trousers leave the bench at 40 inches, sleeves 1.5 cm long, with 2 cm of let-out in the side seams. Tell us your inseam and we hem it before it ships; bring it back any winter after that and the Srinagar shop alters it at no charge.
Buy the cloth
Paid in 7 days
Cut on one block
S to XXL, 1 block
Stitch and finish
Under 2% shrinkage
Hem and dispatch
Out in 24 hours
The paperwork
Three marks, and what each one actually means
Every one of these is a claim somebody else can check. That is the only kind of claim worth printing.
- GSM and oz — what the cloth actually is
- The weight of a fabric decides how warm it is, how it hangs and how long it lasts, and it is a number rather than an opinion. Every label carries it, measured on the finished cloth, so you can hold one piece against another instead of against an adjective.
- Cotton jersey tee200 GSM
- Hand-loomed tweed480 GSM
- Selvedge denim13.5 oz
- Handloom mark — where it was woven
- A handloom registration says a length of cloth came off a hand loom rather than a power loom. Every hand-loomed piece we sell also carries the weaver’s name and village, and the month the cloth came off the loom, on the inside label.
- Hand-loomed pieces2 of 14
- Weaver namedEvery piece
- Heaviest cloth620 GSM
- Free alterations — the fit after it arrives
- Not a certification, a policy. A garment that nearly fits is a garment you stop wearing, so everything leaves long and the Srinagar shop takes it in, lets it out or shortens a sleeve for as long as you own it.
- Trousers as cut40 in
- Alterations in shopFree
- Return window10 days
The makers
Three of the people we buy from
A handful of hand looms in Anantnag and Kupwara and the knitters in Gurez supply the cloth and the hand work for this shop. These three explain what buying direct actually changes.
-
Zahoor Hussain Mir
Hand-loom weaver · Anantnag
“A trader would take the whole season’s cloth in one lot and pay at the end of it, at whatever price he opened with. Now I am paid by the piece within seven days of it coming off the loom, so I can buy the next lot of yarn without borrowing.”
Weaves the cloth for our Chinar Fleck tweed jacket
-
Mehraj-ud-din Bhat
Pattu weaver · Kupwara
“A coat length of pattu is forty days from fleece to finished cloth, spun by hand before any of it reaches the loom. Being paid across those forty days instead of at the end is the difference between weaving full time and taking other work to get through winter.”
Weaves our Pattu overcoat
-
Nusrat Parveen
Hand-knitter · Gurez
“One cardigan is about forty hours on the needles, one knitter from the first rib to the last button. The wool is not dyed, so I sort it by the shade of the fleece before I start, and the shawl collar is knitted on rather than sewn. When an elbow wears through, it comes back to be re-knitted, not thrown away.”
Knits our Gurez lambswool cardigan
Straight answers
Questions people ask about us
We are in Srinagar. The cutting table, the stitching floor, the alterations bench and the people who answer this email are all in the same building, and everything ships from there. Nothing is drop-shipped and there is no third-party seller behind any listing.
Every hand-loomed piece names the weaver and the village on the inside label, and the cloth is sold by weight and weave rather than by an adjective. You can also check it yourself at a window: on a hand loom the twill line wanders very slightly, and because the fleck is dyed in the fleece you can count four or five shades inside one brown. Mill cloth is uniform in both.
Direct wherever the cloth is made by hand. Tweed comes off pit-treadle looms in Anantnag, pattu is handspun and woven in Kupwara, and cardigans are knitted in Gurez, all paid by the piece while the work is still on the loom or the needles. The mill cloth we buy in we name rather than hide: jersey from Tiruppur, selvedge denim from Ahmedabad, suiting from Bhilwara.
Because fourteen is the most we can cut on our own blocks, hold in five sizes, and still alter by hand at the counter. A longer rail would mean buying finished garments in, and then we would be selling the same unverifiable words as everyone else. When a fifteenth piece is worth making, there will be a fifteenth piece.
We tell you in writing, with the reason and a revised date, and you may cancel for a full refund at any point before dispatch. Hand work slips — a pattu overcoat is about forty days from fleece to finished coat and a hard winter moves it. We would rather say so than quietly ship late.
The point of all this
Buy the cloth, not the adjective
Every claim on this page is on the label as a number or a name: a weight, a fibre, a village, a weaver. Check one of them against what arrives — that is the whole business model.