Amaara...Eternal..... Forever
We, at Papertrail fondly remember the ‘Amaara’ bag. It marked a milestone in our humble growth trajectory. In 2009, one of our first customers, Rashmi Deepak of the charming Amaara store asked us to put her logo on the newspaper bag.
At that point in time we were still new and had just found our feet in perfecting the fold and managing the extensive supply chain. I had not applied my mind to printing, its costs and processes. I put to work the old stencil technique learnt at my craft class in school. I took a plastic file cover, drew out the logo on it, pressing down hard with an empty refill fitted into an old pen, used a pen knife to carve out the logo and Voila!! the stencil was ready. I placed the stencil on the bag and with a sponge dipped in green poster paint continued to sponge out the empty spaces in the stencil. And thus was the born the Amaara bag.
I taught the girls this technique and smaller quantities were stenciled. We have now moved onto to other efficient, faster, and perfect techniques but this bag taught us that impossible is a small word and only for the faint hearted…… we continue to use that principle whenever a customer asks us for something we have never done before and have produced some great products.
AMAARA( meaning ‘Eternal or without death’) had a new meaning for us….. ‘eternal hope’, ‘nothing is impossible’, ‘there’s a solution for a problem’, ‘we must go on, no matter what the odds are’ and so many more things. The bag came to mean all of these things to us.