How we work with the workshops

Four hands, or one

A cast statue that reaches a shop in the usual way has passed through a caster, a consolidator, an exporter and a retailer. Each takes a margin. The artisan — the only person in that list who made anything — takes the smallest of them, and by the time the piece is on a shelf there is no longer any record of who they were.

We buy from named workshops in the Kathmandu valley, list every piece under the workshop that cast it, and pay that workshop directly.

What that changes

You can see who made it. Every product page names its workshop, and every workshop has a page of its own with the rest of its work on it. If two Green Taras differ in price, you can look at both makers and see why rather than guessing.

We can answer questions about your specific piece. Not "how are these usually made" — who cast this one, how long it took, and what the workshop would charge to cast a taller version. A shop three intermediaries away from the bench cannot do that.

The workshop is paid on our terms, not on a chain's. Which is the part that is easy to say and hard to verify, so we do the verifiable thing instead: we name them.

The workshops

They are not interchangeable. Some work almost entirely in oxidized copper and are chosen for their chasing; one gilds by the mercury-amalgam method that most workshops no longer do at all; another works in brass with an antique finish. The differences are visible in the catalogue once you know they are there — and they are on the workshop pages.

What we do not do

We do not sell antiques or claim age. Everything here was made recently, by someone alive, and is described that way. A "nineteenth-century" statue in a shop that also sells new castings is almost always a new casting with a chemical bath.