How this woman entrepreneur is building a sustainable accessories brand with plant leather

It all began during a ride on the Delhi Metro.

Gayatri Varun always carried a tote bag her mother had gifted her to work. It was made from animal hide, but at the time, she says, she didn’t think much about it. “I didn’t know any better. It was at home, so I used it.”

Midway through a commute, the handle snapped. The way it broke made it clear that repairing it would not restore its durability. Gayatri decided that if she was going to buy something for work, it should be sustainable and make her feel good to use.

“I found most options for a workplace were either made from animal leather or PU leather, which is a plastic derivative. It led me to plant leather (bio-leather), and I procured some samples,” she explains.

This search became the starting point for Green Hermitage, a luxe-sustainable accessories brand that Gayatri and her husband, Anubhav Pratap Rai, launched in 2021.

The path to entrepreneurship

Born in India, Gayatri spent her early years in the city before moving to the Middle East with her parents at 12, where she lived for three years. She then returned to India for a year at a residential school in Pilani, before moving to Zimbabwe to join her parents and complete her schooling.

After completing law school in 2014, Gayatri worked as in-house legal counsel for an FMCG company. A couple of years later, she quit her job and moved back to Africa to be with her parents, who were still based there. In Uganda, around 2015, she stumbled into climate change and sustainability.

“At a get-together, I met someone who was working in that space, and what he described resonated with me immediately. I had no idea what ‘carbon’ even meant in that context, so I was learning everything from scratch,” she recalls.

Over the next four years, Gayatri built her experience across East Africa, working in Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania. Based in Uganda but constantly travelling for work, she started as an intern, then became a volunteer, an entry-level associate, a part-time employee and eventually a consultant to the Ugandan government on its five-year climate change programme.

The experience took her from working in remote villages with no access to electricity and helping develop small off-grid solar solutions to advising the government on climate policy.

By 2016, she had worked with grassroots collectives, a carbon-access company and the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. But she felt she needed a formal qualification to complement her experience. She applied for a Master’s in Climate Change and Sustainable Development with an integrated fieldwork component at the University of Leeds in the UK and received a fully funded scholarship.

The next question was where she could put that knowledge to work.

For Gayatri, the answer lay in the Global South, where she believed much of the work around climate action, sustainable development and access to resources was still unfolding. She returned to India and began working on climate campaigns, projects and sustainability metrics.

That work gradually led her toward conscious consumption and sustainable production, and eventually to the idea that became Green Hermitage.

The testing phase

While researching plant leather, Gayatri collected samples of cactus, apple, banana, and other plants and ran internal tests to understand how these materials performed under moisture, water, extreme heat and cold, and other factors. They turned out to be resilient.

When the pandemic hit, they were looking for artisans to work with the material. They found a group of migrant workers left behind in Delhi.

“They were willing to try, even though it was unfamiliar. The first samples that came back were fantastic — the material's properties and texture were genuinely impressive, and we became convinced there was real market merit,” Gayatri says.

They hired a designer, incorporated the company, and spent the next eight months lining up materials, manufacturers, vendors and setting up an artisan unit. Eight months later, they had their first collection, designed, sampled, and tested over six months.

For Gayatri, evaluating plant leather starts with lab reports and the material’s bio-composition. “The higher the bio-composition, the harder it is for the material to endure,” she says. Technological advances have helped address this challenge.

“I can point to five years of evidence that these materials aren't just surviving but thriving,” she says, and adds that customers who have owned products for four or five years rarely report issues.

Her approach to sustainability goes beyond the material itself. Supply chain tracking begins with where crops are grown and their impact on soil, then moves to transportation, processing, and the electricity and water used in manufacturing. Product design is also considered through a sustainability lens, including the number of components used and how easily they can eventually be recycled.

The brand also runs an end-of-use programme that lets customers return products instead of discarding them. The company then dismantles the bags and reuses as many components as possible, while the remaining materials are biodegradable.

A team of seven artisans handcrafts the products in a small workshop in Vasant Kunj, Delhi. Earlier, 80% of its bio-leather was imported because international manufacturers offered a “higher level of sophistication.” Now, Green Hermitage sources 95% of its material from India and works with apple, banana, cactus, eucalyptus, coconut, cork, canvas, and hemp, among others.

The products (bags, wallets, backpacks and other accessories) are available on 15 marketplaces in India, including Amazon, Myntra, Ajio, and Ajio Luxe. It has a physical presence in Noida and is setting up other physical spaces with partners. Internationally, it is available in the US, the Middle East, and Australia, and is deepening its presence in Oman and Australia given the response it has seen there. There are different prices ranges for the bags starting from

It has also forayed into the B2B segment, partnering with larger institutions on sustainable procurement. Green Hermitage is a registered vendor with the Taj Group of Hotels, supplying in-house products like bar sets, utility kits, travel tags, and toiletry bags.

Challenges and way forward

Gayatri admits the journey has been difficult, and there were days they considered shutting down.

“The challenge is about spreading awareness and knowledge while also making the product genuinely desirable. The first question we get at a pop-up is usually, "Is this durable? Will it tear like PU, or hold up like animal leather?" We have to answer that not just with words but by showing old samples, test reports, and certifications, alongside the story of the artisan community we work with,” she explains.

Green Hermitage started organically, and the company reached early customers through friends and family, incubator networks, exhibitions, pop-ups, corporate events, gifting and free samples.

As awareness grew, the brand moved into performance marketing, collaborations and influencer partnerships, while continuing to educate customers about plant-based leather.

Green Hermitage remains completely bootstrapped and hopes to become profitable by the end of the current financial year. It is exploring external funding to scale. Being part of Technoserve’s Greenr accelerator programme has helped Green Hermitage with financial literacy, marketing, mentorship, business development and market access.

For Gayatri, the next phase is clear.

“Everyone at Green Hermitage wakes up with one shared goal: making the company 100% sustainable across all our processes, and maximising our impact by reaching as many customers as possible.”