The inexorable clock has quickened its feet, rushing through a final countdown for Oh Scrap! Madras. On January 15, the Chennai-based upcycling enterprise would have officially retreated from the sustainability stage, one it filled admirably for five years. Until the coup de grace is delivered to it that day, Oh Scrap! Madras would be kept on “life support”, its website (www.ohscrapmadras.com) open for a clearance sale with prices marked down by up to 60 per cent on all products.

Showcasing a dress made by Oh Scrap! Madras
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While it lasted, Oh Scrap! Madras enunciated the shibboleths of sustainability flawlessly. The finery and artsy trinkets and home decor and utilitarian bags and a spectrum of other fabric-related creations it shipped from a well-appointed but unpretentious 2BHK flat in Thiruvanmiyur were born of upcycled fabric scraps. Women constituted more than ninety percent of its workforce. On top of that, both co-founders were women. Designer Priyanjoli Basu and demographer-epidemiologist Dominique Lopez, the co-founders, made sure the fabric scraps came from local addresses, drawn from the godowns of textile factories, local fashion brands and the wardrobes of individual donors. The employees got to work from home not as an occasional perk, but by default. A tailoring machine was parked at home.

Wall hangings by Oh Scrap! Madras
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Oh Scrap! Madras’ work processes could have gone into a primer on United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, painting an illustrative picture of them — not all the 17 goals, but some of them certainly.

Beyond the gravitas of meeting SDGs, Oh Scrap! Madras brought a levity to its business. The name carried a chant-like appeal and even a winsome irreverence. As Priyanjoli puts it, “I just wanted something fun and something that would stay with people in their mind.” And it did, becoming a synonym for sustainable fashion in Chennai.

A tote bag made by Oh Scrap! Madras.  
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The enterprise gave both its co-founders a huge and uplifting sense of purpose. But paradoxically, the things that fill us with purpose also deplete us. Over the last five years, Priyanjoli and Dominique had been lurching from one product to another, one sale to another. It was in fact baptism by fire for Oh Scrap! Madras. Established in August 2019, the fledgling enterprise would soon find itself catering to a closed world. The pandemic had shut down avenues of growth even before they were fully open to this enterprise. During this period, it put much of its fashion line on hold, and was largely making masks.

Sustainable fashion is usually a hard sell. As the duo puts it, each in different phraseology and accent, Oh Scrap! Madras would have taken what was considered dead and imbued it with new life, but the magic was never in the discarded and upcycled fabric, it was in the act of transformation. But the buying public was largely fixated on the former (discarded fabric) and often altogether missed the latter, the creative treatment it received.

A necklace made with upcycled fabric by Oh Scrap! Madras 
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“People did not understand why they should buy something made from discarded fabric,” Priyanjoli sighs. Shaping the fabric was not half as challenging as reshaping perceptions. Have they succeeded in the attempt? Yes and no. They have made many proselytes having won them over to sustainable fashion, but the naysayers still abound. The business of upcycling discards is largely viewed with brow-knitting suspicion, often brusquely cast in the domain of desperation, not innovation. The market for sustainable fashion remains niche. If Oh Scrap! Madras with 100 products on its catalogue now and a product shipping history covering four major metros in India (Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi; besides, of course Chennai) even parts of the United States should decide to throw in the towel, surely, there is still considerable work on perception engineering to be done.

As Oh Scrap! Madras bows out of the scene, its co-founders strike a positive note. There is something comforting about this ending.

A leonine toy by Oh Scrap! Madras.
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“Ending something is not the same as giving up,” Dominique notes. “It is about knowing when the work you set out to do has been completed.”

The journey would have ended, but it was on track when it lasted.

The numbers bear this out. In a post titled “5 years recap” they put out on Instagram, they note that more then 850 garments were made available in their thrift store; and Oh Scrap! Madras “has successfully upcycled, recycled, thrifted or donated 5.5 tons of fabric scraps since 2019”.

Furthermore, as Dominique says: “We also used to have upcycling services for clients where they could send their old fabric and we could revamp it. We ran a donation service where people could donate their old clothes. We conducted upcycling workshops, both offline and online, regularly; and we organised talks about sustainability.” In a generous final act, Priyanjoli and Dominique donated piles of fabric scraps to up-and-coming designers who had been following Oh Scrap! Madras for years.

Back to the recap note, it says “we were a wonderful team of 12 out of which 11 are women and seven are local women artisans.”

“The women we empowered are no longer just part of the brand — they are the brand,” Priyanjoli says with quiet pride. These women, once bound by societal constraints, now hold the tools to write their own stories. Priyanjoli continues: “What we were creating was not just art from scraps. We were giving women a voice, an identity and a chance to reclaim their own story.”

“What we have done,” Dominique reflects, “is not just upcycle fabric, but upcycle lives.”

Some of the women were house helps, and what they earned from Oh Scrap! Madras was a big boost to the family income — in fact, during the pandemic it was a lifeline, says Priyanjoli.

Would Priyanjoli and Dominique want to recreate the magic, but in a different form?

To answer that, Dominique takes us to the very beginning.

Through a chance encounter, the duo had met — Priyanjoli back in Chennai after her studies in fashion design in London; and French national Dominique who had settled down in Chennai with her family — and discovered they were on the same page about how to put sustainability ideals into practice. And Oh Scrap! Madras was born in 2019.

They want to recreate the magic, but individually, each taking a different road to purpose, one paved with sustainability-driven goals.