Shivam Punjya: Behno

Behno is an ethical luxury handbag label known for its silhouettes and design language, but the brand did not begin with fashion ambition alone. Its founder, Shivam Punjya, was in India conducting research for his Master’s in Global Health at Duke University in North Carolina when he began seeing the textile industry from the inside. Through fieldwork, he came face to face with the realities garment workers were navigating every day, like low wages, unstable protections, and working conditions that do not match the polished image of global fashion.

Around the same time, the world witnessed the Rana Plaza collapse, a tragedy that exposed the human cost of careless production systems. In 2013, the Rana Plaza factory collapse shook the fashion industry. Over a thousand garment workers lost their lives in a building that supplied global brands. This disturbed him, as so many lives were lost, and it became one of the key reasons he committed himself to working towards improving the lives and conditions of garment workers.

The word Behno means sisters in Hindi. The name speaks to the women whose labour forms the backbone of the fashion industry and to the community the brand seeks to stand alongside. The six key areas they focus on are health, garment worker mobility, family planning, women’s rights, worker satisfaction and benefits, and eco conscious principles brought into the production process. 

Behno first entered the market in 2015 as a ready to wear label, but in 2019, the brand transitioned toward handbags. The label is based in New York and manufactures in India, and as it expands further into the Indian market, actor Katrina Kaif joined as both an investor and ambassador.

Shivam Punjya was later recognized among the Vogue Business 100 Innovators and named as part of a new generation of entrepreneurs influencing the future direction of fashion.

The Garment Worker Project

Together with Muni Seva Ashram in Gujarat, he developed what became known as the Behno Standard, a framework for dignified working conditions, environmental responsibility within the production process, and overall worker satisfaction. Ideally, this is how fashion should function.

The belief was that garment workers should be seen as part of the design process itself, not as invisible figures within the supply chain.

The Garment Worker Project emerged as an extension of that philosophy. Through photography and film, the initiative documented the daily lives of workers inside Behno’s partner factories, with the aim of humanizing the narrative.

As the project articulated, "The initiative demonstrated that garment workers are not a commodity and that garment production in the multibillion dollar fashion industry need not be based on the exploitation of labour."

Exhibitions brought these stories into spaces like New York galleries, inviting audiences to see the hands and faces behind luxury products. If you carry a bag, you should understand the ecosystem of people who made it possible. That level of transparency helped position Behno as one of the early voices connecting luxury design with worker dignity.

Today, it is very easy to become desensitized to the language of sustainability, because every brand claims responsibility and promises change. For all these years, we have heard the same things before. It's high time for fashion to move away from fast moving scales and focus more on artisans and their lives, because their skills and craftsmanship are what make the industry.