Manreet has a design studio and a jewelry store in the historic Fontainhas, showcasing her sculptural jewellery. She works with traditional techniques like sandcasting and often with rural artisans to create bold pieces.

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What led you to pursue a career in design?

I have always been interested in crafting things, be it seed jewellery or embroidery. Visual arts were always very exciting but I like the idea of design bringing practical beauty into daily life.

Design marketing at Parsons sounds interesting. What was the course and the experience like?

I realized early on that marketing was a necessity in an industry where designers can have a major impact but are often the most unacknowledged  and underpaid.

Parsons’ Marketing program was unique in the sense that it was rooted in the design industry. We were learning about digital marketing before the social media days! There were classes on learning how to strategically put together collections, retail math and product display.

Also learning all this in the fashion mecca of NYC added another dimension. I particularly enjoyed my internships with a luxury retailer and a high-end floral designer. One learned the discipline and all these qualities have served me well. I still haven’t unlearned those while trying to run my business in India where chaos rules.

What have been some of the challenges and rewards of running your own design studio, and what are the lessons you've learnt from your journey so far?

To own and run one’s own business in India is one of life’s greatest challenges that no one warns you against.

It was helpful that I started with a clear creative goal and with my brother, who had a background in business and e-commerce. We created an art jewelry brand that was interested in working with traditional crafts and creating pieces that offered a new perspective to Indian design. There was no money to be made in the beginning since we were bootstrapped and chose a segment that was driven by a new product vocabulary  instead of selling out to the market research driven mass market product. It has taken us some time but our pieces are now highly valued for their design quality.

The Venus necklace

What are some of your creative influences and how have they impacted your work?

One is always looking and observing and listening to the magical things that one is surrounded by. All this comes together when I sit down to sculpt new pieces.

The Manifest design process

Given the tactile nature of my work, I don’t create moodboards or 2D drawings etc . Pieces manifest as mini clay sculptures first, that are an outpouring of all the various little pieces of  information one stores in the subconscious over the years.

A fragment of a shell on a Goan beach, textures of the earth on a salt plain, traditional jewellery worn by a vegetable seller etc. are all examples of these inspirational snippets.

You are also visiting faculty at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. What is it like, teaching and interacting with the new crop of designers?

It was a new experience for me and quite eye-opening. For better or worse, we are in an era where we are bombarded with visuals 24x7 and have 3-second attention spans. Often, in order to fit in or to fulfil financial goals or out of sheer laziness, designers tend to recycle ideas. This is a pity, since it squashes new, paradigm-shifting thoughts.

My biggest challenge and learning was to push the design students to break these patterns.  Once the shell was cracked, there was no stopping them. This was very fulfilling for them and for me. As teachers, we have to remind them that the mediocre thought has to be put aside and aspirations have to be kept alive.

What next? What themes and ideas are you inspired to explore going forward?

I have always wanted to work directly with rural artisans, and use their craft to re-invent the design language of folk-art rooted design.

In the eyes of Indian and international audiences there is a set perspective of what contemporary Indian craft design should look. My personal goal for the decade ahead is to break these perceptions. So yes, no paisleys or tigers in my work.

My Reha collection is a successful example of what I want to develop upon. It started as a small pandemic era experiment to give a knife-maker in Kutch a supplementary source of income. We continue to work together on this collection which is one of the most successful ones for my brand in the last several years.

A piece from the Reha collection