New York, NY (production across India) · Est. 2010 · Founded by Navroze S. Mehta & Sonali Mehta-Rao (father & daughter)
Navroze Mehta spent years taking his family on adventures across India -- to villages where women wove textiles, men carved wood into art, and whole communities preserved craft traditions that mass manufacturing was slowly erasing. He and his daughter Sonali founded Mela Artisans in 2010 to build the bridge those artisans were missing: a path to a global market, steady income, and the recognition their work deserved. The objects are stunning. The story behind them makes them matter more.
Navroze Mehta grew up in India and always felt the pull of its craft traditions -- the intricate carved wood, the mosaic work, the marble cutting, the textiles woven in cottage workshops that had been doing it the same way for generations. When he took his daughter Sonali on trips across the country, she saw the same thing he did: extraordinary skill, zero access to markets, and a slow erosion of traditions that had no reason to disappear except that no one had built the infrastructure to sustain them.
In 2010, father and daughter founded Mela Artisans together. The name means "gathering" in Sanskrit -- a meeting point between the maker and the world. The brand works with over 7,000 artisans across India, approximately 60% of them women, providing full-time work for more than 1,000 new artisans every year alongside business counseling, financial workshops, and skills training. The materials are reclaimed and local -- bone, marble, wood, brass -- worked using heritage techniques into objects with a clean, contemporary aesthetic that belongs on any table or shelf in the world. Carried at Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale's, and in over 300 boutiques across the United States.
On a registry, Mela Artisans is the category where beauty and purpose are inseparable -- handcrafted objects with centuries of technique behind them and a future worth supporting.
