About
Why we started
Sab Link is a community-led initiative that helps underrepresented craft and art businesses gain visibility, customers and a community to grow with. We have seen firsthand the brilliance and talent in our community. Creatives burning with ideas but nowhere to pour them out or guide them how to scale their businesses. And I thought: what if they didn't have to? Sab लिंक is that 'what if' made real. It is a gathering place where creative minds collide, where hands weave together a community, where ideas ricochet and spark into something neither of you imagined alone. We host workshops - illustration, painting, design, food walk, poetry for art enthusiasts to experience the magic of hand-work. For Creative businesses we conduct exchange programs, skill enhancement sessions, pop-up shops. The real magic happens through the art of connection, where artists find their people, creatives build a community, or struggling small businesses find their voice. This is also a safe space to think outside the box and be unapologetically ourselves. To talk art, society, politics, culture without flattening the edges. To loiter and reclaim spaces, to build collectives with like-minded people. To chalo ajao phir!
What we do
Sab लिंक is a community of craft and skill businesses and the craft and culture enthusiasts. We believe a craft survives when people learn it, value it and buy it, so we bring all three together.
Businesses host workshops, set up pop-up shops and take part in our events and visitors learn from them and buy directly from them. Art and craft lovers meet the person behind the work, and the business gains customers, visibility and a community that returns. Take appliqué, a craft of Aligarh that is far less known than Chikankari from Lucknow. Crafts like this need more people who know them.
Through Reclaim Spaces, we take people into the heritage of their own city, with heritage partners who lead our walks. We try to bring the marginalised history and spaces back in conversation and a part of the mainstream discourse.
Together, this is an experience community for learning about craft, supporting the people behind it and bringing overlooked places back into public conversation.
What we are building next
Sab लिंक began in Aligarh, but the problem is not limited to one city. Across India’s smaller towns, craft and skill businesses, especially those led by women and other marginalised communities, work with little visibility and little support. We want to build in two directions.
Exchange programs between towns. We plan to bring craft and art businesses from different towns to run workshops and pop-up shops in each other’s cities, so that a business from Moradabad could teach in Aligarh while an Aligarh business reaches new customers in Bareilly. Each business would gain new buyers, and the people who attend would learn crafts they would not otherwise meet. We hope to expand to craft towns such as Moradabad and Bareilly.
Simple tools for running a business. Many of these businesses have never had basic systems for taking orders, tracking stock and keeping records. Without them, growing is harder, and showing a business’s numbers to a bank or investor is harder still. From our conversations with the businesses we work with, we are planning custom tools shaped by what basic feature they need, and we will build them together with the businesses.
The same records will help them access funding opportunities easily.
To see what we have been doing lately, read Our journey so far → on our blog.