Chapter 1 · Many hands
A chappal passes through many hands.
A Kolhapuri chappal begins as a hide. It becomes leather in a tanner's hands, takes shape on a cobbler's last, and is cut, braided and stitched by people who learned the work over a lifetime. Then it passes through more hands that never touched the making: traders, wholesalers, resellers.
By the time it reaches a foot, two things have usually gone missing.
Vhaan exists to return both. Our principles were written down in 2016, a year before we sold our first pair in 2017. Everything we have built since is an attempt to live by them.
Chapter 2 · A craft older than its name
Your chappal's family tree goes back about 800 years.
Swipe or scroll sideways through time →
12th century
Kalyana, in today's Karnataka
The chappal's roots are usually traced to the reign of King Bijjala. In the same years, Basavanna opened the Anubhava Mantapa in Kalyana to people of every caste, and argued that a person's worth is not decided by birth.
As the Sharana tradition tells it
Haralayya, a cobbler of Kalyana, and his wife Kalyanamma made a pair of sandals for Basavanna as an act of devotion; tradition holds that they made them from their own skin. Basavanna would not wear them, saying he was not worthy of such a gift. In the version devotees tell, he placed them on his head and said only God could wear them. A pair believed to be theirs is still kept and worshipped at Bijanalli village in Kalaburagi district.
We share this story as the tradition tells it, not as documented history, and for what it means. A reformer looked at a cobbler's work and felt unworthy of it. The power of the day did not agree: tradition records that King Bijjala had Haralayya's family put to death after his son married a Brahmin minister's daughter.
Early 1900s
It gets its name: "Kolhapuri"
The chappal took its name from Kolhapur, where it was traded. Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, the ruler who reserved half of his state's posts for backward classes in 1902 and fought untouchability, also championed this trade; 29 tanning centres opened under his rule.
2016 → 2017
Vhaan is born
The four commitments on this page were set down in 2016. We sold our first pair in 2017.
2019
An official address
The Kolhapuri chappal received a GI tag covering four districts of Maharashtra and four of Karnataka.
2025
It walks a runway in Milan
The Kolhapuri chappal appeared on a Milan runway, and its makers had to protest before they were named. The craft is world-class. Its makers are still too often invisible.
Chapter 3 · Follow the rupee
A market that ran on silence.
Vhaan did not begin with a product. It began with a question: why do the people who make the finest chappals earn the least from them? The answer was information.
Only the middle of the chain could see both ends. The artisan was told "there is no demand." The buyer was told whatever closed the sale. The artisan never saw who wore his work. The buyer never saw who made it, how, or from what.
A pair sells for ₹1,500–2,000 in Pune and Mumbai. How much reaches the person who made it?
What the buyer pays: 100%.
Figures reported in 2025 by the head of an artisan cluster in Belagavi district.
The maker earns ₹250–400. Roughly one rupee in five.
Economists have a name for this.
In 1970, George Akerlof showed that when buyers cannot tell good goods from bad, they stop paying for quality, and the honest maker is pushed out by the cheap imitation. That is what happened to the Kolhapuri. Vinyl and machine-made copies were sold under its name. Buyers paid for authenticity they could not check.
And the craft paid the price.
Artisans who did the real work were paid as if it did not matter. For years, young people from artisan families have left the craft, and many tanneries have shut.
Chapter 4 · The boy who left, and came back
Why I went back
A note from our founder
I was born a Dalit, into a cobbler family in Maharashtra. Children from families like mine learn two things early. We learn what skilled hands can do with leather. And we learn how the world looks at those hands.
Nobody has to say it out loud. You learn that the work your family does decides how people see you, before they know anything else about you. So you are given one way out, and it is a good one: study. Study hard enough and you will never have to do this work. Study hard enough and you will sit somewhere no one asks what your father does.
I took that way out. I earned a master's degree in IT and became a senior developer at a bank. By every measure my community had been taught to value, I had made it. A secure job, a respected desk, a life far from the workshop.
But my work there taught me something I could not unlearn. All day, I built systems to make information flow correctly from one end to another. And I kept seeing a market, my own people's market, that ran on broken information. The trader told the artisan there was no demand. The trader told the buyer whatever he liked. The two ends never met. I knew exactly what that was. It was a system with a middleman sitting on the data. And I knew, as an engineer, that such a system can be redesigned.
Leaving was not a simple decision. I was giving up the very security my education was meant to buy. To many people, a cobbler's son walking away from a bank job to sell chappals looked like going backwards. Some days, I had to argue with that voice inside myself too, because I had heard it all my life.
What settled it was a question of choice. The generation before me did this work because birth gave them no choice. I was the first who had one. I could stay away, and no one would blame me. Or I could choose to come back, not as a son who failed to escape, but as someone who walked in with open eyes, an education and a plan.
That choice is the whole idea of Vhaan. I want the next child in a cobbler family to be free to become a developer, a doctor, or anything else, without guilt. And I want the craft to be free too: open to anyone who chooses it, and respected enough that choosing it is a matter of pride, not escape.
I did not come back to rescue this craft. I came back because it was always mine, and I wanted it to be worth returning to.
— Bhushan, Founder, Vhaan
Chapter 5 · Four promises
Each one answers a specific way the craft was being lost.
Tap a promise to read it.
01
Empowering artisans by enriching craft
A craft lives only as long as its makers can live from it.
Charity keeps a craft alive for a season. Demand keeps it alive for a generation. So our work is to build steady, year-round demand for genuine craft, so that artisans are not idle in the monsoon and squeezed in the festival rush. When the work is valued, the price follows. When the price is fair, the next generation stays.
Enriching the craft is how we create that demand. We bring back designs that were close to being forgotten, so artisans have more to make, and more reason to be paid well for making it. And a fair price should not be a favour granted by a seller. Artisans should have a real say in what their work is worth, because only they know what it costs to make it well.
02
Knowledge that belongs to everyone
An informed buyer is the artisan's strongest ally.
The middleman's power rested on knowing what others did not. Take that away and the whole chain changes. So we explain before we sell. Our product videos show what each design is, how it is made, and what separates real craft from imitation. Customers have carried those videos into local markets to check what other sellers were telling them. That is exactly the point: we want people able to judge any Kolhapuri, including ours.
Beyond selling, we are building an open record of the craft: its designs, techniques, materials, pattern names and regional differences. Knowledge that is written down and filmed can no longer be lost, misrepresented, or sold back to the public as something it is not.
03
A skill should not die with its master
Craft knowledge should pass by willingness, not by blood.
Many great artisans spent forty or fifty years mastering their work. When they died, much of it died with them. This was nobody's fault. For generations the craft passed only from father to son, and when a son chose to become a doctor, an engineer or anything else, as was his right, the line ended.
Dr. Ambedkar observed that caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers: it ties a person to work by birth. That rule harmed this craft in two directions. It bound children who did not want the work, and it shut out people who did.
Since 1950, Japan has protected the skills of its master craftspeople by law, recognising the knowledge itself as cultural property. Our own music and dance traditions already show the answer: the guru–shishya bond, where a master chooses a disciple for devotion, not birth.
Vhaan is building that path for leather craft. Anyone, of any caste, creed or gender, should be able to learn directly from a master and carry that master's work forward. The learner gains a craft. The artisan's child gains the freedom to choose their own life, without the weight of letting a legacy die.
04
Dignity for the craft and its makers
A master leather artisan is an artist, and deserves to be honoured as one.
Society reveres the painter, the sculptor, the singer. An artisan who can braid leather finer than thread was taught to stay quiet about his work. The difference was never skill. It was caste.
India's own saints argued against this for centuries. Basavanna, as the Sharana tradition tells it, refused to wear a cobbler's sandals because he felt unworthy of them. Sant Ravidas, born into a leatherworking family in Varanasi, whose verses are part of the Guru Granth Sahib, imagined Begampura: a city without sorrow, where no one is ranked by birth. Shahu Maharaj championed the chappal and fought untouchability in the same lifetime.
Vhaan carries that argument into the marketplace, where it can be proven every day. A craft that is understood, paid fairly and bought with pride stops being a stigma and becomes a lineage. We want a young person to say "my family are leather artisans" the way others say "my family are musicians."
Chapter 6 · What we will not do
Principles are tested by what they rule out.
We will not sell what we cannot explain.
If we cannot show how a pair is made, we do not sell it.
We will not pass off imitation as Kolhapuri.
The name belongs to a craft, a place and its people.
We will not change what a Kolhapuri is to chase a trend.
We bring back old designs; we do not dilute the craft into something else under its name.
We will not raise prices because others charge more.
A fair price is fair to the maker and the buyer. People who know Kolhapuris can tell the difference.
We will not run a craft like a factory.
Handwork has its own pace and judgement, and we respect it.
Chapter 7 · Where we stand
Since 2017.
300+
artisans worked with
27+
endangered designs revived
200K+
people reached
20+
countries we ship to
We were among the first to sell Kolhapuris online. We repair the pairs we sell, because a chappal mended is a craft respected.
Eight hundred years ago, the story goes, a reformer refused to wear a cobbler's sandals because he felt unworthy of them.
Our work is smaller and slower: to make sure the hands that make the chappal are seen, paid fairly and remembered. Every pair we sell is one more step toward that.
So when you wear yours, at your wedding or on an ordinary Tuesday, you'll know whose hands it came from.
Find your pair