1952
The counter opens
Fakhruddin Nalwala takes counter no. 14 in Chowk Bazaar, selling suiting and shirting by the yard to the tailors of Nanpura and Rander.
Since 1952
The Atelier
One counter of cloth in Chowk Bazaar became four rooms, a cutting floor and a pattern archive that goes back to the year the shop opened.
Home/Atelier
72
Years of trade
The Beginning
A counter, a ledger
and a good eye
Fakhruddin Nalwala came to Surat in 1949 with a background in cloth and no shop to sell it from. Three years later he took a single counter in Chowk Bazaar and began supplying the tailors of the old city by the yard.
His advantage was never price. It was that he would refuse to sell cloth he did not believe in — a habit that lost him customers in the first decade and kept their sons in the second. By 1971 the counter had become a shop, and the shop had begun to cut.
Three generations later the arrangement is unchanged: we buy the cloth ourselves, and we make the garment ourselves. Nothing is sent out. Nothing is subcontracted.
“We are merchants who learned to cut, not tailors who learned to sell.”
The Record
Seventy-two years
1968
First direct import
A consignment of English worsted arrives from Huddersfield, bought without an agent — the beginning of a relationship with the mill that still holds.
1971
The house begins to cut
Sons Yusuf and Taher train under a Bombay master cutter and open a cutting floor above the shop. The first paper patterns are drafted and filed.
1989
The ceremonial book
Wedding commissions outgrow the suiting trade. A dedicated silk and brocade room opens, buying from Varanasi and from Surat's own handlooms.
2004
The pattern archive
Thirty years of paper patterns are indexed and re-housed. Patterns from 1974 are still in use, altered gently as their owners change shape.
2019
The third generation
Murtaza Fakhruddin takes over the cutting floor. The fabric rooms are rebuilt with north light — the only honest light to judge a navy in.
The Bench
Eighteen pairs of hands
A cutter, four coat makers, three trouser makers, two finishers and the people who keep four thousand bolts in order.
MF
Murtaza Fakhruddin
Master CutterThird generation. Drafts every pattern in the house and conducts the basted fitting himself. Twenty-six years at the bench.
YN
Yusuf Nalwala
Cloth & BuyingSecond generation. Travels to the mills each season and decides what enters the library. Has refused more cloth than he has bought.
RS
Ramesh Solanki
Head Coat MakerSets the canvas and hangs the sleeves on every jacket that leaves the floor. Thirty-one years, all of them in this building.
NV
Nasreen Vohra
Finishing & ButtonholesWorks every buttonhole in silk by hand — roughly nine minutes each, and the last thing done before a garment is pressed.
How We Work
Four rules of the house
Buy the cloth ourselves
Twenty-six mills, no agents, no middle warehouse. If we cannot stand behind where a bolt came from, it does not enter the library.
Cut it in this building
Nothing is subcontracted. The person who takes your measurements is the person who drafts your pattern and stands beside you at the mirror.
Three fittings, minimum
A garment is corrected on the body, not on paper. If the third fitting is not right, there is a fourth — and the delivery date waits.
Keep the pattern for life
Your paper pattern stays in the archive, named and dated. Come back in fifteen years and we will alter it rather than start again.
A shop that has been in one street for seventy-two years cannot afford a single badly cut jacket. Everyone here knows whose father it will be shown to.Yusuf Nalwala — Cloth & Buying, second generation
Visit
The doors are open Monday to Saturday
Come and see the cutting floor. Ask to be shown the pattern archive — we are quietly proud of it.