TOKOU is a small start-up lifestyle brand based out of Mumbai. The brand’s idea is to create crafts from rich tapestry of stories related to flora and fauna from all over the world, stories that have been carrying emotions and nuances for centuries. TOKOU is essentially a search for stories, an attempt to document them, and a venture to sew them across. TOKOU believes that this way, each story will keep living for the time to come.
Our Story
How it all started?
Tokou began with the story of its founder, Gayatri, and her summer visit home. It was August 2023, and the summer heat was at its peak. Her grandmaa lovingly prepared a variety of local leaf curries to help her cope with the scorching weather. Gayatri always credits her grandmaa for introducing her to the many native leafy herbs—each with a story of its own. These stories had been lovingly passed down from her grandmaa to her mother, and then to her.
On quiet summer afternoons after lunch, her grandmaa would speak endlessly about the alluring recipes made with native leaf vegetables. Some of the leaves she mentioned are now rarely found in the green backyards of Assamese villages. Growing up, Gayatri had always loved the native greens. But that summer, she rediscovered that love. As an adult, she was inspired to take a closer look at those leaves—to find meaning in them, to recall their memories, to explore their culinary significance, and, above all, to reconnect with the passionate child she once was.During her stay, she and her grandmaa would explore their backyard daily, documenting different herbs. This process led her to start an Instagram page called @musing_flavors, where she showcased these herbs—and from there, the idea of Tokou was born.
Founder
Gayatri Gogoi is a textile design graduate from NIFT, Mumbai, in the year 2020. An enthusiast in surface embellishment work in fabric and clay, she has expertise in portraying the vastness of the world through her miniature lens. She believes that design is not something that is always created but something that already exists and needs to be found. Her way of seeing the world allows her to perceive and depict ideas in a much simpler sense. “I do not follow complicated design ideas; rather, I like to go with things that surround me and implement their characteristic in my design,” Gayatri says. For her, it has been a journey of finding symmetry and beauty in nature and curating them into design ideas through her crafts.
