About BAAF
Four generations. One living craft.
The company is new. The craft behind it is not.
The name
"Baaf" means weaver.
In Kashmiri, a Baaf is the craftsperson at the loom — not the pattern on the cloth, not the finished shawl, but the person whose hands know it before it exists. We named the company after that person on purpose. Craft, to us, isn't a decorative idea; it's a specific set of skills, held by specific families, passed down because someone chose to keep teaching them.
That's the ecosystem this company exists to represent: spinners, weavers, dyers, embroiderers and finishers, working across generations in Srinagar.
Four generations
A family business, not a founding story.
This isn't a heritage brand built around a marketing narrative. The family has worked in Kashmiri textile craft for four generations — the current generation grew up around the same looms, dye vats and workshops it now runs. THE BAAF, the company, was built to give that inherited craft a dedicated platform for working with international brands. The corporate entity is new. The skill it represents is not.
Place
Rooted in Srinagar.
Pashmina fibre begins its journey on the Changthang plateau, near the Ladakh border. Wool comes from Kashmir's own mountain sheep. But the spinning, weaving, dyeing, embroidery and finishing — the part that turns raw fibre into a textile with a name — all happens here, in our workshops in Srinagar. That's not incidental. It's the reason the craft can't simply be relocated to a lower-cost manufacturing centre elsewhere: the skill is local, inherited, and specific to this place.
4
Generations
80+
Handlooms
90–100
Artisan families
5
Workshops
Srinagar
Kashmir, India
The workshops
Five workshops. One network of artisan families.
Across our workshops, roughly ninety to a hundred artisan families work in hand-spinning, hand-weaving, dyeing, embroidery and carpet-making, supported by more than eighty handlooms. Some households specialise across generations — a family's spinners, weavers and finishers each carrying a different part of the same craft.
Come see how we work.
The craft is easier to understand in process than in summary — take a closer look at how a piece moves from fibre to finish.