KUFRI
DALLAS, TEXAS, USA
Mili Suleman was born in Mumbai, India, grew up in Oman, and moved to the United States at eighteen to study liberal arts and graphic design in Dallas, Texas. After working for ten years with an agency as a professional designer, Mili sought a change. “I started to lose interest with graphic design because it was coming too easily to me; it wasn’t really a challenge anymore. I wanted something more tangible... something more complex,” she explains.
Mili’s family had an apartment in Mumbai where she spent school vacations, but she had never deeply explored her native country. Having made the decision to leave the world of professional graphic design, Mili traveled to India and immersed herself in the culture and environment: “I took two exploration trips, one with my dad, one with my mom. I explored different types of crafts just to see what would speak out to me. I love going to the source of where things are made. I like traveling off the beaten path, so I think I naturally gravitated towards interior villages.”
KUFRI’s woven textiles are produced in the southern Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. Mili acknowledges the challenges of establishing working relationships in remote villages, some requiring four hours and three modes of transportation to travel to the nearest city:
There was a lot of trial and error in the beginning...There can be communication issues and problems with deadlines and pricing. But I’ve chosen my village units carefully and have been loyal to them and vice versa for several years now. They understand my commitment and are interested in growing their business with KUFRI.
Mili has tried weaving, but her role remains that of designer. She notes that designing woven fabric is vastly different from designing for print. Woven cloth is designed on a grid that represents the intersections of the warp and weft. “There was a big learning curve. There are so many restrictions! I was coming from a graphic-design practice, where you could do pretty much anything you wanted in Illustrator.” Mili spent time traveling to many different villages and learning the art of weaving. “But sometimes when I would design something, it wouldn’t get woven that way.”
In 2019, Mili launched KUFRI’s flagship Dallas showroom, featuring sample interior decor made from the cloth that has been produced in India. The showroom also includes a studio space where an in-house woven textiles designer works with Mili. “What I design, she brings to life...We collaborate and make changes while it’s still on the loom.” The time savings are immense. Mili no longer has to send her designs to India and wait for samples to be made and returned to her before making changes or going ahead with production. “I send my designs with thread references, colors, cuttings, handwritten notes, and notes from the computer...Now we are able to send a real woven sample, too, which is amazing.”
Mili’s designs are inspired by her travels. She looks to a variety of sources to create the mood for a collection: “I gather colors, take pictures, and collect books and ephemera that inspire me. It’s loosely put together...It’s very organic, and I allow myself to be experimental.” Mili loves using photography as part of her recording process. She sketches with a variety of black pens, using different nib and point sizes, and does all of her coloring in Illustrator.
While visiting New Mexico, Mili was deeply inspired by the architecture and beauty of the landscape. She returned to Dallas and used the architectural forms she had seen to design a line of block-printed textiles, which are also produced by hand in India, but in a small artisan workshop in a major city. Mili sends her designs, created from sketches and paintings uploaded to Illustrator, to the block printers. They carve wooden blocks by hand, using simple tools, then create strike- offs from Mili’s color specifications. After the strike-offs are approved, the workshop prints the full collection on handwoven cloth made by KUFRI’s weavers.
Mili’s work celebrates the natural qualities of handwoven cloth. Slubs, bars, and slight irregularities are considered flaws in mass- produced cloth but add life and authenticity to KUFRI cloth. All of the cotton, linen, and silk yarns are manufactured in India, and more than half of Mili’s designs include handspun yarn.
“My mission is to help preserve handloom weaving, to provide employment to women and aging weavers, and promote a conscious, beautiful life at home through KUFRI products.”
Each region in India has its own style of weaving; in India, weavers learn their craft based on traditional designs created for the domestic market. “My aesthetic is different,” says Mili. “I like to see what we can do with this process but still keep it fresh and modern. A lot of times the weavers will look at my designs, and they say, ‘This is so simple. Are you sure you are going to be able to sell this?’ I say, ‘Trust me. This is what my clients want.’” One weaving village that works with Mili has particular skill in a style of woven design known as ikat. Yarns are dyed prior to weaving with a resist technique that involves tightly wrapping the yarn in bundles according to a specific pattern. When the yarns are dyed, the bindings prevent the dye from penetrating, and the wrapped portions remain a different color. The finished fabric shows color blocks with soft edges.
When the finished cloth arrives in Dallas, another part of the process begins. Mili and her team design samples and products for showrooms around the country where KUFRI textiles are offered as yardage to interior designers and architects. All of the samples, as well as pillows and table linens, are made by small businesses in Dallas. Mili has also forged manufacturing relationships with local artisans to develop furniture, ceramics, and wallpaper to complement KURFI’s fabrics. She strives to keep her global business as local as possible by working only with small artisan businesses at home and abroad.
Through KUFRI, Mili seeks to preserve the craft of handloom weaving. As aging weavers retire and younger generations choose not to take up the trade, the future of the craft is threatened. The availability of inexpensive, mass-produced textiles further imperils the traditional industry. In most of the villages where Mili’s cloth is woven, the weavers are quite elderly; another weaving group is made up entirely of women who are divorced or widowed and generally have no other means of support.
It’s really important to keep working in these villages; the number of weavers is reducing every year because they age out. All of the kids generally know weaving; it’s just that some of them choose not to be in the business or do the craft. But my hope is that if we keep doing interesting, creative work that challenges them and keeps the orders coming, it will encourage the children to stay in the family business.
