A manjapai in Tamil culture – in colours of yellow, tinted in red with motifs or writing – normally heralds goodwill and auspiciousness when used for special occasions like weddings, birthdays. And for many women now in Manthichi area near Vaigai river Madurai – the manjapai or YellowBags have proved to be of good fortune.

Take the case of Prabha (37) with two children. Her traditional, conservative family was okay with her working outside the home and supporting her family with her earnings – only because the tailoring unit she was part of was a distance of less than a kilometre from her home. The tailoring unit is an initiative of Tamil Nadu home-grown startup TheYellowBag.org. founded in 2014, this initiative now provides jobs to more than 30 women from lower-income households, including differently abled women. YellowBag has not just worked with physically-challenged women but also those with mental challenges and learning disabilities.

Panjavaranam (37) is differently-abled with limited mobility in her feet. But you wouldn’t know that when you see her defly plying YellowBag’s screen printing units and churning out bag after bag at a tailoring machine, designed for her.

“When it comes to married women in traditional homes – a workplace that’s even a few kilometres away means taking a bus. And many houses would rather the girl or wife stay at home than rub shoulders with men in public transport and workplaces. So after some experimenting, we moved our rural initiative to the city; to the heart of Madurai – so that we could help women earn a livelihood,” he adds.

It sells as much as 2 lakh bags a year to a host of large corporates in Tamil Nadu such as Intellect Technologies (formerly Polaris). Even the Tamil Nadu government has taken note of the startup. And for its latest conferences on climate change action, the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forests Department, placed all its orders with YellowBag. Research material, pamphlets and information booklets were all packaged in the bright, yellow bags of this little startup.

But the government has also helped these women in other ways. “We realised many women have vocational skills like tailoring thanks to many government schemes aimed at empowering them. But they don’t have sufficient work opportunities. So this is how we streamline opportunities and ensure their participation in the workforce,” says Krishnan Subramanian, founder of YellowBag.

Because of this traditional mindset, thousands of women in India lack an opportunity to earn like men. And YellowBag hopes to reach women even in such households so that they balance the demands of their family and culture.
YellowBag makes cloth bags from cotton, jute, and other sustainable materials for international brands. And for this it uses its own network of tailors ,“Tulasi Women Tailoring Network.” It also trains the women so that their products meet international quality standards and compliance needs like GOTS & Fair Trade.

A completely bootstrapped initiative, YellowBag in the last 10 years has seen organic growth. They’ve had companies approach them routinely for bags with company logos printed on them for corporate gifting or during their events and exhibitions. But during Covid all that came to a grinding halt.

“Since there were no events. No activity. We had no orders. We then had to switch to making masks and trying to tide over. A few old customers seeing our struggle placed orders just out of goodwill,” he adds. And YellowBags hopes to return that goodwill by some of its social initiatives in Madurai.

While YellowBag is a for-profit organisation. There is also the YellowBag Foundation that runs parallel to this, which tries to enhance the education of children in after school classes and train local women with vocational skills. “During Covid, we were able to raise funds and meet the grocery needs of a 1,000 families in Madurai. We now run post-school activity centers for children in the communities we work. What we hope to do with this is boost the confidence of children and give them life skills,” says Subramanian.