Movement

Heritage Labs

Heritage Labs is New Common's movement for contemporary craft — brands that use ancient South Asian textile traditions as their primary design material. This includes handloom weaving in Varanasi, Kanchipuram, Maheshwar, and Chanderi; block printing from Bagru and Sanganer; natural dyeing from indigo farms in Kutch and madder roots in Rajasthan; and embroidery traditions like chikankari, kantha, zardosi, and phulkari. The brands in Heritage Labs are not selling nostalgia. They are engineering a future for living craft traditions by connecting master artisans to a global audience that values material honesty and process. Many are co-founded with weavers' cooperatives or employ artisans directly on fair wages. Products in this movement carry the weight of centuries of knowledge encoded in every thread count and dye recipe. New Common evaluates Heritage Labs brands on artisan relationship quality, process transparency, natural material sourcing, and the design intelligence brought to age-old techniques.