Shivam Punjya Founded a Luxury Handbag Brand With The Goal of Addressing Poverty & Global Health While Creating New Standards Within Indian Factories

Behno is a NYC-based handbag label whose mission is to redefine and bring sharp awareness to sustainability and ethics to fashion and to set a new standard for manufacturing for the garment trade that revolutionizes the way garment workers and artisans are treated, viewed, and employed. behno works with many Indian factories that incrementally implement The behno Standard at each one. The standard is broken down into six categories: health, garment worker mobility, family planning, women’s rights, worker satisfaction & benefits, and eco-consciousness. behno designs each collection to promote slow-fashion where consumers buy what they love for the years to come. The label also creates curated capsule RTW collections upon request and on a project basis to promote artisan and ethical techniques.

Check out this interview:

How do you define sustainability?

For me, sustainability is the interplay between being conscious of our environment, people and the communities in which we work.

It sounds like you've done a lot of work in the Bay Area (I myself am from Oakland) - With Cali having a huge stake in the sustainability space and NYC having a huge stake in the fashion industry - do you see a bridge being drawn that popularizes sustainable fashion across the board?

Yeah, how fantastic! I have such a soft spot for California. Not just because I was born and raised there and my entire family’s still there, but because so much of my learning around social justice came from the space. I grew up near San Francisco and went to UC Berkeley for undergrad where I worked on social justice issues and also had some of the most remarkable professors that challenged us to really connect the dots – and also identify missing dots – to understand the premises of social (in)justice. There’s a definite school of thought that’s cultivated simply by being exposed to California.

Moving to NYC six years ago, and specifically for fashion, was different because at the time, the sustainability and ethical manufacturing conversation was in nascent stages. Sometimes, it was a challenging for me to really get an intimate buy in from different stakeholders in our industry. But I’ve seen such a shift in understanding the importance of sustainability and ethics in fashion in the past three years, and I wonder if some of the west coast-based brands that initially “popularized” sustainability in their branding had anything to do with this. Now, between my time in NYC and California, with the gamut of global factors we’re grappling with, I do feel that there’s an overarching connection. I don’t know if it’s so much a geographic one as much as I think it might be an intersectional one where folks from different industries are working in interdisciplinary ways. Coming into fashion with a global health and developing economy background allowed me to look at the fashion space differently.

What are the ways in which you're addressing poverty and global health?

When I founded behno, we crafted “The behno Standard”, which was a bottom up approach towards addressing issues important to both artisans and garment workers but also the brand. Including grassroots communities at a fundamental level is imperative for me. The standard focuses on six different elements, ranging from healthcare to eco-consciousness to garment worker social mobility. All the factories we work with incrementally implement The behno Standard and we work intimately with all our factory partners. I believe that brands themselves have to be in the field and form personal relationships with everyone in their supply chains.

Does being a person of color / culture influencer your brand? If so how?

Absolutely. 100%. The personal is political. I’m first generation American with both my mothers born in Zambia and both my fathers born in India (my mother’s younger sister married my father’s younger brother and we all grew up together in the same house). We can study cultures and identity, but to truly understand the essence of that culture and identify with it, you have to be a product of it. Because you’ve lived it. I mean, that’s why we push forward what matters fundamentally to each of us. At behno, all its pieces are made in India, where my team and I spend a lot of time with our factories.

Going to India as an “Indian” allows me to work with a community I grew up visiting with some ease, in terms of language and understanding some cultural nuances. But we have folks on the team who are based in India to guide the rest of the behno team who might not have that intricate knowledge of the country. I believe that at behno, our responsibility is to listen, process that information meaningfully, listen some more, and then utilize our platform in partnership with our stakeholders to see how we can produce beautiful objects and impact social change.

What is your greatest inspiration?

At UC Berkeley, I had one of the most prolific, mobilizing professors, Ananya Roy. She taught a class focused on understanding global poverty and its complexities. She made us feel uncomfortable in class, alternating perspectives, and compelling us to look at our own identities and privileges to identify when we should insert ourselves, distance ourselves, or hand the mic to someone more appropriate when having a discourse around “development” and a narrative that’s perhaps not our own. Professor Roy and her class changed me at the core.

What do you think is the biggest thing that needs improvement in the sustainable fashion industry?

If you had asked me this question before the pandemic spread, I think my answer may have been different. Before, I may have said that collaboration within the sustainable fashion space was limited and needed to really pick up with folks leaning on each other for resources, best practices and ideas. But now, in light of the global climate in which we live in, I’ve seen a shift already. People are coming together because we’re all being forced to be introspective in thinking about what’s really important; the planet, people, our families and communities. I’m on a few email chains where people are coming together and reaching out to see how we can all work together towards a common goal. Within the sadness of what’s going on, something beautiful is brewing.

Is there anything exciting you have coming up (despite our current pandemic)?

I’m not sure if this is particularly exciting or not, but for me it’s been exciting. The current pandemic has catalyzed me to go back to our roots and reexamine our brand ethos. Examining how we design or not design, connect with our customers, and continue to work with our partners both homegrown and in India. We’re asking ourselves tougher questions around what’s really important and how we grow as a business.