Impact & transparency
Where a rupee of revenue goes, how a weaving rate is set, and what a weaver did and did not agree to — written down so it can be quoted back at us.
Where a rupee goes
The split below is the costing model every piece is priced from. The weaving payment is fixed first and everything else fits around it — not the other way about.
- 55% — Weaving payments
Weaving payments
The commissioned rate paid to the named weavers and working hands on a piece — agreed before the warp is wound, part-paid up front, and unchanged by what the piece later sells for.
- 15% — Materials and dyeing
Materials and dyeing
Yarn, zari, dyestuff and the dye pit's running costs, bought at the cluster wherever the cluster sells them.
- 12% — Fieldwork and documentation
Fieldwork and documentation
The visits, films, photographs and making records — the education budget. This is spent whether or not a piece sells.
- 10% — Running the site and shipping
Running the site and shipping
Hosting, packing, insured despatch from Hyderabad, and returns.
- 8% — Suka's operations
Suka's operations
The two people who run it. Deliberately the smallest line that still keeps the lights on.
How a weaving rate is set
01
The day rate is the floor, not the target
Every commission is costed from the loom days the technique honestly takes, at a day rate above the state minimum wage for skilled work — never from a target retail price worked backwards.
02
Rates are agreed before the warp is wound
The weaver knows the full figure, in writing, before work starts. It does not move afterwards — not for a slow month, not for a defect the loom did not cause, not for what the piece eventually sells for.
03
Part payment travels first
A third of the commission is paid when the order is placed, because yarn and dye are bought before a single day is worked, and that cost should not sit with the weaver.
04
Every hand on the record is paid on the record
Warping, dyeing, tying, border joining and finishing are separate line items to the people who did them — not folded into one payment for whoever owns the loom.
The consent policy
Every profile in the people directory records four permissions separately, and the pages enforce each one. These are the same four fields the profiles print, so this policy and the site's behaviour cannot quietly drift apart.
- Name
- Publishing a weaver's name needs their explicit, recorded consent. Where it is withheld, the person appears as their work — "a warper in Gadwal" — and their name is not stored in the site's data at all, so it cannot leak by accident.
- Portrait
- A photograph of a person is asked for separately from their name. No portrait consent means no portrait file in the build: the profile shows a woven tile, and the absence reads as a choice honoured, not a gap.
- Voice
- Field films and audio that carry a person's voice are published only with a third, separate consent. A profile without recordings is a profile of someone who said no, and that is the whole story.
- Translation
- Consent to publish words in English is not consent to run them through a translation service. Where translation consent is withheld, that weaver's words are never sent to the machine-translation API — they stay exactly as given.
Education-led, not profit-first
Suka exists to document handloom and fund that documentation by selling what the looms make — in that order. The films, the making records and these pages stay published whether or not a piece sells, because a buyer who understands what an interlocked border costs in hours is a buyer who pays for one. If the shop ever starts deciding what the fieldwork says, this page is the one that should be quoted back at us.