What We Carry

Tholé began with a small leather bag.
I received it as a wedding gift from my Dutch friend, Daimy. It was simple: the leather firm, the stitching precise, its surface marked in small ways that made it feel alive. I remember turning it over in my hands, wondering about the person who had made it.
Daimy had encountered this leatherwork during her time in Tamil Nadu. After several demanding years of work, she had taken a break and come to India to volunteer and reset herself. There she discovered the work of local leather artisans and was struck by what they could do. She carried some of their products back home to Europe. Her family and friends admired them, but they were also curious: where had they come from, who had made them, why did they feel different from the objects they could buy around them.
Years later, after finishing my doctoral studies, I came to Pondicherry seeking a pause of my own. While volunteering at an NGO, I attended a leather workshop simply for fun. That was where I met Laxmi, one of the artisans. I watched her hands work with the material. She knew when leather would yield and when it would resist, and could judge its thickness, strength and behaviour through touch. Much of this knowledge had no written manual; it had been accumulated through years of working with the material.
I kept returning. The workshop became a hobby: I learned, made mistakes and experimented alongside the artisans. Their skill was extraordinary, but I began to notice a gap. The knowledge and workmanship were there, yet the products did not always speak to the aesthetic expectations of a contemporary, urban audience.
That question became the beginning of Tholé. Could contemporary design help bring this work into new homes, cities and cultural spaces without separating it from the people and place that gave it meaning?
For us, this is where cultural value becomes concrete. A leather bag made in Pondicherry is not valuable only because it is handmade. Its value lies in the knowledge embedded in it. When Laxmi's understanding of leather becomes part of a contemporary object, that knowledge enters spaces where it might otherwise remain unseen. A bag can sit in a home in Amsterdam, London or Mumbai and still direct attention back to the material culture and skilled hands of Tamil Nadu.
Design, in this sense, can act as a bridge. It can make local knowledge legible to new audiences, and give existing skills a place within contemporary aesthetic culture rather than treating them as traditions that belong only to the past. The value created is therefore not only commercial: recognition itself has value, changing what kinds of knowledge are seen, desired and considered worthy of contemporary design.
Daimy's experience gave me an early glimpse of this. The products she carried back to Europe were admired partly because they brought something unfamiliar into a familiar setting. Their journey did not make them less connected to Tamil Nadu; it made that connection more visible.
Tholé was built around this belief. It took nearly twenty months of learning, designing, failing and beginning again to bring the idea to life. We do not believe contemporary design has to become placeless to become global.
An object can travel far and still carry the knowledge of the place and hands that gave it form.
That is the value we hope every Tholé object carries.