Her bio runs into three pages.
Her sense of design is ever changing (‘I changed my frame from a round one last year to a rectangular one this year’).
She morphs into something else just as easily (after several years in garment design, she started designing jewellery and stuck to it).
From Garden Vareli to Wendell Rodricks to Titan’s export division and later to Tanishq, she has been there and done that: from becoming the Designer of the Year at SNDT University in Mumbai when she was barely 18 to emerging a finalist four years later at the 4th international Indian jewellery design contest by DE CTA.
That’s Shreedevi Deshpande Puri, 33, Sweden-born, and in Bangalore since she was eleven. Now, she is a mother a one-and-a-half-year-old son and the wife of Shamsher, who owns The Dusters, a property management firm in the city. “He is practical and I am not,” says Puri, the dreamer and a design consultant for Ganjam. “Sometimes, I do bounce off ideas with my husband, but what I find most encouraging is he’s been very supportive in whatever I do.”
While she draws inspirations from architecture and nature, her job is to make jewellery a point of conversation. “Which is why we give away story cards along with the jewellery piece,” she says. “I have been drawing since childhood, and I took up art as an elective subject in the tenth standard while the rest of the class chose economics.”
Right after her diploma in apparel design and manufacture from SNDT University (Mumbai), Puri became an in-house designer for Garden Vareli for two years. Then she started a garment design consultancy firm Vistara with Wendell Rodricks and Maya Rao. “Hemant Trivedi was my professor at college and my first job was under him where I worked with Wendell,” she says. “Hemant taught me to follow your instincts despite what everybody around you says. He believed in my work and invested me with a new confidence.”
The self-assurance worked. After designing western wear, children’s wear, men’s wear, she moved on to fashion shows and advertising shoots (some of her clients included Mafatlal, Arvind Mills, Akbarallays, Kid Power, Silk Research Institute of India and Lux). Buoyed by the growing popularity, Puri launched a collection of loungewear at Glitterati in Mumbai under the label of Shreedevi Deshpande.
Simplicity is her mantra. “I don’t believe in fussy designs,” she says. “Mine is more to do with cut, detailing of garments, textures and no actual embellishment of the garment.”
The same logic holds for jewellery, too (‘make something simple, more aesthetic and make it well’). “Balancing elements is not easy. Take for example, Mon Dria’s paintings. They are simple forms and colours, but the way he balances and brings in harmony is outstanding, though his works are abstractions of the natural form.”
This aside, she was part of a design course by the Developing Countries Trade Association, a British project to develop the jewellery trade in India. “A lot of my learning was thanks to my scholarship to UK and my work experience with Titan,” she says.
So whether it’s using Ikat, the Gujarati weaving technique for her latest line of jewellery or making wire baskets to let the diamond shine through, it’s an amalgam of many work aesthetics at work. “Just before I go to sleep, some design pops into my head,” she says. “Whenever I travel, I visit museums, see new things and get inspired.” (She visited jewellery fairs in Italy, London, Munich, Las Vegas and Tokyo on her field trips courtesy Tanishq.)
Ask her what she designs for herself, and she takes a long pause. “It’s most difficult to design for yourself. One tends to have a second thought on everything and never end up making it. It’s easier to design for others.”
Her wardrobe is eclectic. “I like to wear whatever fascinates me and it could be from a small shop on Commercial Street or even Wendell Rodricks,” she says. “I don’t like labels. Anything that looks nice on me is fine.”
And the road ahead? “I can’t see myself two years from now,” says Puri, who revels in the company of books by Jeffrey Archer, Robin Cook and Richard Bach. “So far, destiny has always taken me in the right direction, so guess, I will see where it leads me.”
1, ME, MYSELF
Shreedevi Deshpande Puri (33)
Diploma in Apparel Design and Manufacture, SNDT University, Mumbai
Currently design consultant, Ganjam
Earlier with Titan, Garden Vareli
Attended jewellery fairs in Italy, London, Munich, Las Vegas and Tokyo
Trained students at NIFT and NID
Designed uniforms for boutique personnel at Tanishq
Started a garment design consultancy firm with Wendell Rodricks
Attended a 90-day jewellery design workshop by Lorna Watson and Kirsty Struthers of the UK
Born in Sweden; in Bangalore since she was eleven
Consultant for Jewelsindia.com, an e-commerce venture by Think Ahead
(First published in City Reporter, 2003)