The Long Way Here
A personal account of
travel, textiles, and the
work that became
House of Wandering Silk
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House of Wandering Silk, founded by Katherine Neumann, grew from a lifelong engagement with travel, textiles, and craft communities.
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It is grounded in core values shaped by over a decade of work in the humanitarian sector and guided by a commitment to fairness and long-term partnerships.
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Today, House of Wandering Silk sits at the intersection of these experiences, collaborating with artisan clusters across India in the belief that beauty, created with integrity, can sustain both craft and community.
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Read The Long Way Here →
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Welcome to our story. I’m Katherine, founder of House of Wandering Silk, a social enterprise based in New Delhi, India. The company, founded in 2011, is the culmination of more than fifteen years of dedicated passion and exploration, and I’d love to share the journey that brought us here.
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The evolution of House of Wandering Silk was unconventional. It didn’t begin in fashion or business, but in values shaped over time and by a lifelong pull toward travel and textiles. The story of HOWS is inseparable from my own.​​​​
Colours, textures, patterns: travel provides an endless source of inspiration. From the the magnificent Blue Mosque in Mazar-e-sharif, to a humble pair of indigo kasuri geta in Kanazawa
Beginnings
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I was born and raised in Sydney, Australia, to immigrant parents. At eighteen, I moved to Japan, where I lived for six years and completed a degree in International Relations at Tsukuba University.
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My studies, the multicultural student community, and extensive solo travel across Asia dramatically widened my worldview. I left Japan in 2004 with a clear conviction: I wanted to work in international aid and development.
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That path took me first to London, where I interned with organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Oxfam. I interviewed - unsuccessfully - with Safia Minney, fair trade pioneer and founder of People Tree.
That meeting lodged a kernel in my mind, slowly growing over the following years into what would become a drive to build my own fair trade company.
In mid-2005, I took a job in Afghanistan. I traded Clapham for Mazar-e-Sharif, beginning what would become a decade of work in the humanitarian sector, living and working in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa, responding to conflict, disaster and displacement.​
On Women, Work, and Meaning
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Across these regions, I worked with local NGO partners on dozens of livelihoods projects aimed at empowering women. This often meant training women in handicrafts or other local, small scale production, and trying to open markets for their products.
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Many projects were well-intentioned, heavily funded, and quietly abandoned once external support ended. When NGOs moved on, communities were frequently left with little more than unused skills and unmet expectations. I couldn’t reconcile this with the idea of sustainability.
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Over time, I became convinced that real, lasting impact only exists when everyone involved has a genuine stake in the outcome - when dignity, income, and continuity are built into the structure itself. Long-term partnerships with ownership built in for all parties - such as fair trade systems, cooperatives, social enterprises, and micro-credit - began to feel like the most meaningful paths to sustainable change.
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That tension - between intention and impact - made me reflect on what I truly valued. The most enduring skills among the most marginalised communities, were often carried quietly in cloth, in craft, and in the hands of the women themselves.
Textiles became more than objects; they were vehicles for change, tangible expressions of culture, labour, and exchange - and, I realised, a way to translate values into action.
Traditional textiles in remote corners are my greatest weakness. Swat Valley, Pakistan, is a treasure trove of high quality, traditional textiles and crafts
On Textiles
'Fashion' itself was never the goal. It was rather textiles that were the thread that ran through those years.
Around the time of high school graduation, I toyed with the idea of becoming a designer for a few months - taking a few evening courses and completing work experience at an illustrious Australian fashion label - before realising that my real interest lay elsewhere.
What stayed with me was not fashion as industry, but textiles as culture: material expressions of place, skill, and exchange. Travel and textiles have always been intertwined. In every country, I found myself drawn to local styles; to pattern, texture, and handwork; and to the women who quietly sustain these traditions.
Across more than seventy countries, I developed a habit - almost a reflex - of seeking out handmade textiles: authentic pieces of great beauty that carried the story of place, community, and lineage of skill.​
Beyond their intrinsic value, textiles were practical. They folded easily into my backpack, were versatile, and, when worn, boldly expressed my identity and values.
Long before I understood it intellectually, I was responding to the logic of the Silk Road - where textiles functioned not only as objects of beauty, but as currency, as carriers of knowledge, and as conduits for cultural exchange.
Cloth moved where people moved, absorbing influence, technique, and story along the way. That idea - of trade as exchange rather than extraction, and of textiles as living records of cross-cultural contact - quietly shaped how I began to think about value, authorship, and fairness within a global system.
Whenever I imagined building a fair trade company, there was never any doubt: it would centre on handmade, traditional textiles and the women who crafted them.
Gohar with her daughter; our first artisan partners, Taxila, Pakistan
A Necessary Failure
In 2007, while living in Pakistan, I met fellow Australian Cath Braid, founder of the social enterprise Polly & Me. Working with women embroiderers in the remote Chitral Valley, her brand produced exquisite, character-rich accessories.
Seeing her work made something click. The idea I’d been carrying for years finally felt tangible. Cath’s work clarified what a fair trade business could actually look like - the nuts and bolts of creating a company that centers artisans.
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I launched a small, premature 'brand' called Oh!Magnolia (a name whose origin I can no longer explain!). I collaborated with a women’s group I knew through work, commissioning phulkari embroidery while I experimented with branding and catalogues.
The process was enjoyable; the outcome, not especially noteworthy. I left Pakistan after two years, and the half-baked project dissolved. (Many years later, in an unexpected full circle, I reconnected with those same artisans in Delhi. Today, we work with them once again, on the very same embroidery.)
Today, House of Wandering Silk has settled into an intimate, light-filled space in South Delhi, home to our textiles and our working days
Building HOWS in India
By 2010, the idea of building a fair trade business had shifted from aspiration to compulsion. I moved to India and settled in Delhi; a city I knew well, and one that made sense both creatively and logistically.
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India’s textile heritage is vast, intricate, and alive. At the same time, the depth of rural poverty and the inequalities faced by women made clear why I wanted to build something impactful.
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For three years, I worked part-time in my day job at an international NGO while building House of Wandering Silk in the evenings and on weekends. In 2011, after a year of sampling, we established our first - and still-running - partnership with a cooperative of women in Murshidabad.
In 2012, we made our first sale of Kantha Sari Scarves to Kamala, a beautiful store in Connaught Place that still stocks our scarves today.
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In 2013, I registered House of Wandering Silk as a private limited company in India and left my job of nearly a decade. That same year, I met Vini, a woman from Northeast India who was just starting her own small manufacturing unit.
Her background in design and work with luxury brands is the reason House of Wandering Silk has been able to achieve such high levels of quality in production - and it is still Vini and her tailors - two brothers - who manufacture 90% of our clothing.
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In 2014, I met another woman from the Northeast who would become just as foundational to the growth and direction of the business, becoming our first and most enduring employee, and eventually, a director.
Today, her niece has joined our small Delhi team, making House of Wandering Silk feel very much like a family business.
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I ran the company from my Delhi home until 2015 - storing sari offcuts in an unused bathtub and monopolising the living room with piles of fabric - before moving into a friend’s basement studio.
After several subsequent moves, we now work from a light-filled studio in South Delhi, complete with a small, tranquil garden. It is a place shaped by time, relationships, and continuity - values at the heart of House of Wandering Silk, and of the long way that brought us here.
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