In a world of Labubus, be an Aashiq Rat

The home base of Juhu Beach Studio (JBS), an internet trove of cute and cheeky textile collectibles, is nowhere near Mumbai’s popular beach. Instead, it is a cramped 1BHK apartment in Andheri East that founders Akshara Mehta and Prakruthi Rao confess they have recently been asked to leave. The reason? Mehta vaguely gestures at the room around us. 

It’s not the impeccable work desk of creatives you see in design magazines, with stuff neatly packed away in artfully labelled containers. This space is bursting with the cosy chaos of creativity manifested in endless fabric scraps and sewing supplies. To walk around the flat one must squeeze through cluttered tables and chairs. Every surface is covered in knick-knacks alongside bags and boxes of products that are yet to be released, including JBS’s first foray into canine collectibles. After years of being certified cat people, they’ve created one in the shape of a red puppy christened Tommy Tamatar. A single Aashiq cap—one of their most popular products (not, in fact, sported by Ranveer Singh but photoshopped onto his head as an April Fools’ joke)—lies atop one of these boxes. On a shelf, five mannequin heads stare ominously at us.

Rao, sporting a pink dragonfly and green caterpillar clip in her hair, pulls open two cupboards to show me metres of fabric in every colour imaginable. Both founders clarify they had warned their landlady about this chaos before moving into the studio—their fourth in the same neighbourhood since 2019—but it was only after she actually saw it for herself that she became agitated.

Yet this maximalist chaos is what exemplifies JBS. Since their inception six years ago, when they released a collection of 60 hats online to test the waters, the small business has worked exclusively with textile waste to handcraft products that are not only idiosyncratic but also hyperlocal.

Mehta and Rao, who met in 2014 at NID, Ahmedabad, while studying Textile Arts, agree that Juhu Beach is not a place but a feeling. And with JBS, their hope is to capture the vibrant, breezy vibe of this locality that defines Mumbai through colourful, campy decor and everyday items, like a rollie keychain and Mehfil Lights fabric suttas.

JBS’s most fast-selling product, the customisable Aashiq Rat, is inspired by a staple in “Mumbai’s wildlife”—and a personal story. “In Mumbai, there are hardly any tigers or elephants. Our wildlife is cats, lizards, cockroaches, ants, spiders,” explains Rao about their rodent mascot. “One night, my roommates and I were asleep in our college dormitory when we heard scratching sounds,” Mehta reveals, leaning forward conspiratorially, “We realised a rat was trying to eat our bathroom door from the inside so it could escape.” Using bags, slippers, and other personal items, Mehta and her roommates created a pathway to the main door for their rent-free resident. Needless to say, the rat walked away, unharmed.

Like New York, Mumbai too is overrun by rats—and everyone has a rat story. That may explain the popularity of their Aashiq Rat, for which they routinely receive strangely specific customisation requests—from a rodent with Hello Kitty tattoos to one carrying tiny little purses. There are rat iterations with a goatee and even one dressed in a traditional Parsi dagli. “We were recently asked to make a stripper rat,” they share.

In a world that can’t seem to get enough of mass-produced plushies like Labubus as that “little treat” and splash of whimsy in endlessly bleak days, JBS’s one-of-a-kind pieces are not only slowly handcrafted (a single Aashiq Rat, for instance, can take up to a week to complete), they also often come with customisations. Upon purchasing their Messenger Pigeon chakhna (a word they use to describe miniature decorative pins and keychains), you can request for words to be embroidered (“mujhe kya” reads one such little heart posted on their Instagram).

Of course, working with textile waste and hand-stitching items means that no two JBS pieces are ever alike. “Even if it’s the same design and something we’ve produced multiple times, each woman on our 10-people team has a slightly different hand. It just never looks the same,” Mehta points out. This homegrown uniqueness and warmth is perhaps why the brand has won over so much of the internet, amassing nearly 20,000 followers on Instagram and receiving custom orders from companies such as Puma and Deloitte. There is an unpretentiousness to JBS’s products, a sense of comfort that comes with their random colour combinations and quintessentially Indian designs. Mehta and Rao make it clear they have no intention of hopping on any trend or creating the next Labubu. “I don’t know if it’s okay to say,” Rao whispers, “but people should be a little more afraid of looking exactly like everybody else.”

Through adorable collectibles, they are extending the life cycle of fabric that might otherwise end up in landfills. Their 2023 documentation of the process of working with textile waste is what first made the brand go viral on Instagram. The painstaking procedure involves sourcing materials from godowns and factories, testing it under the sun for at least 24 hours, then sending it out to be laundered. “You will hardly ever find clean fabric in waste, so we’re very particular about that,” Mehta notes. All JBS products, Rao adds, thus end up being limited-edition, based on the quantity of sourced material. “Using textile waste means you may never find the same material again. So, if we want to make the Aashiq caps once this material is over, we literally cannot.”

As the sky grows darker, the women in the studio begin to straighten up, extricating themselves from their MAQI sewing machines and preparing to leave. Rao and Mehta settle back into their chairs to discuss their work playlists (Taylor Swift and R&B respectively) and love for Shah Rukh Khan (Rao’s ringtone is ‘Dard-E-Disco’). They reveal that JBS’s next move is to outsource labour by training women across Mumbai to work from home.

Whenever they discuss their work, they seem to speak in an ironic tone, as if they can’t quite believe it’s really happening. “She is our lead product developer” or “she is the head of communication” is how they describe each other’s roles, making air quotes around the job titles. On most nights, they end up staying in the studio past midnight. Rao needs to remind herself that this is stress they would have felt lucky to have some years ago. “And the best part of it all is that I’m running it with my best friend,” Mehta confesses, “That even if it gets difficult, your friend is right next to you and you can laugh about it. You can always just get a snack and figure it out later.”