MotherEarth [was known as Industree] is a design led craft based company and have been working with natural fibres for over 15 years in retail and in exports, operating out of Bangalore. We currently work with a large base of rural artisans and design, develop and market a wide range of furniture & home accessories hand-crafted in natural fibre. We have our own stores - one each in Delhi, Kolkata and Bangalore and also supply to major retailers in India like Home Town, Home Stop, Central, Landmark, etc. The aim is to work with craftspeople in a self-sustainable fashion – marketing rural skills to urban markets. With this intent Industree is now scaling up and broadening its product offering to include garments (woven, embellished or stitched by SHG’s or rural artisans), food (organic and natural) and a wider range of home linen apart from our range of natural fiber products as well as a large range of handicraft decor, furniture and gift items.

We are in the process of setting up a new brand which will be a domestic retail chain store - starting with 11,000 sq ft large format store in Bangalore. It shall be a social brand that offers the consumers the best of the Indian natural hand crafted products while simultaneously providing livelihoods to the disenfranchised rural artisans and labour. We have got investment from the Pantaloons group (Big Bazaar, Central, Home Town etc) for the same. We will also have shop in shop presence in other Pantaloon outlets like Home Town and Ethnicity. We plan to have about 40 stores operational in 5 years. And one store each month from March 2009. For the same we are looking at suppliers preferably artisans, NGOs or cooperatives or fair trade organisations with whom we can tie up.

Mr. Raminder Rekhi, CEO has over 13 years of exposure to rural enterprise development, forging marketing linkages, supply chain management, sourcing, logistics, vendor development, media management etc. This involved community mobilization, training, empowerment and capacity building etc. During his stint with Pantaloon Retail India Ltd, Raminder had been instrumental in the opening of 12 new stores totalling 3,78,000 sq. ft. (Prior to Jun ’01 Pantaloons had just one store of 12,500 sqt) and increasing turnovers from Rs.20 crores to Rs.250 crores. During the course of his career, Raminder has interacted with a variety of NGOs and CSOs including those working with farmers and linked them up to markets and retailers as well as sensitizing consumers on their products
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Mrs .Neelam Chhiber is Managing Director, Industree  and  Managing Trustee, Industree Foundation, Bangalore, India. Neelam, an Industrial Design graduate from the National Institute of Design, is a fellow of GSBI 2008, and Social Impact 2007-2008. Her 24 year working life has been devoted towards building marketing platforms and supply chains for rural livelihoods.  Neelam believes Industree's biggest challenge and reward has been to facilitate and enable producers to manage themselves in changing scenarios.
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Mrs Gita Ram, co-founder, craft activist, mentors the company, and has been its principal social investor providing it with loans of upto 150,000 USD without collateral, at less than market interest. She is the leading light in Industree’s quest to uphold a tradition of volunteerism. This is essential to keep the balance of this venture that hopes to benefit the economically under privileged, through a for profit enterprise where often the discrepancies of free market wages , between urban management and rural producers can be quite extreme.
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Mr. Pinaki Ghosh has over 10 years in the hospitality industry, Retail and merchandising and has been working with organizations like Big Bazaar and Radhakrishna Foodland. His expertise includes new store set-up , merchandising , supply chain, vendor Development and Brand promotion ,Currently he handles all India sales and manages merchandising of the Food and home décor categories.
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Mr. Mohinder Singh has over 8 years of experience in Merchandising and Marketing and had worked with Gokaldas Exports , Shahi Export and TSS buyng house . Currently he handles Sourcing , Garment production , Merchandising and Marketing. He is bachelor in Computer Science from Adarsha College and PG Garment Export Merchandising & Management from National Institute of Fashion Technology.
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Mr. Suman Krishnaswamy manages the fields of accounts, financial management and foreign exchange. He has over 16 years of experience and in the last few years he has been also concentrating on automisation. He has been associated with Industree for the last 5 years, managing the Chennai operations. His area of operations are streamlining operational systems within the company related to purchase, stock flows, despatches, domestic customer relationships. Currently he is involved in overall supervision of all matters related to company law and statutuary procedures, as well as company accounts. He is involved in the business planning and future projects of the company.
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