At our work, many a time we have copied ideas from others. Not designs, weaves, colours, or prints, mind you!. There are one too many people designing our products, right from the yarn dyeing to garment stitching and everything in between. So, none of our designs belongs to one person.
But what we have copied over the years is to try understanding what should be the living wage? What does design democracy mean? How to collaborate with craftsperson? What are the benchmarks for transparency in business? How to communicate with consumers? etc., and we continue to learn. We always make sure to thank the person/brand from whom we acquire knowledge, its a long list.
As we are not into reviving material, we haven't gone in the direction of copyright, trademark or ownership. Our images are not watermarked, our blogs seldom have our brand name, except garments none of our products carries our brand label. We are working towards un-labelling our entire product range in future.
We believe our work is - of the land, by the people, and for the people.
Today, we would like to share a brilliant idea which we copied recently from our mentor Santosh Koulagi which he had implemented at his workplace.
After getting inspired by his simple idea on trust, now, we have kept an 'X' amount of money inside a safe box, accessible to all our team members for their emergency needs. None of our team members needs to take permission or let others know of the amount taken or it's purpose.
By implementing this idea, we have tried to eliminate any of our members to take loans with heavy interest or sheepishly ask us for an advance. This system comes with a small rider. Any amount taken from the safe-box needs to be returned as soon as practically possible with an added ten rupees.
It's been a few months of implementation and I overheard that the safe-box is used cautiously and the amount is growing well too! We plan to extend this idea beyond our Bengaluru team soon.
It's a small effort in showing trust, value co-workers, support each other at a difficult juncture, and in team-building. There is no copyright on this idea, in fact, we trust you to copy.
