Sonali Patel
A bag designer who dreams of colours of rainbows and constructs one under the brand name ‘Our Slug Life’
How did you come up with this colour palette?
In a market full of boring neutral choices of colours, we surely knew ‘Our Slug Life’ would stand for bright hues of life, happiness and young spirit!
The personalities of both of our co-founders are such that playfulness, depth, variety, and cheerfulness define us, and these colours precisely reflect that on our range.
Also, did I tell you we offer our cyclists to pick their choice of colour in all custom made gear?
What brought this idea of creating bags for bicycle riders?
To answer this question, I’ll have to begin with the origin of Our Slug Life.
Our Slug Life was initially co-founded in 2016 by my partner Sudhanshu and me as a platform to share our slow travel experiences, life and the conscious ways of living it. We believe slow is the way to go.
What is life if it’s not about the little experiences we go through every day? 2016 was also when Sudhanshu started self-supported solo tours across the country on his bicycle.
To cut a long story short, the primary driving force of now being India’s first custom bike-packing gear making business was the lack of availability of good technical equipment that Sudhanshu went through in the initial years of touring in India.
The vision for Our Slug Life gradually grew more extensive; we wanted to expand into a project for us to work on in the future together as a team, shining light onto the community of cyclists and like-minded people.
Years down the lane, the Pandemic Corona Virus brought led us to kickstart our dream project of adding a custom adventure bag-making business under our umbrella.
What is your brand’s motive?
Our motive is simple. We want to bring top-quality technical adventure gear to our country, India, which is also made in India. We want to create a better experience for riders by providing all the necessary luggage to fulfil their dream of the outdoors.
While we are at it, you have to know that all Our Slug Life gear is meticulously designed in-house and handcrafted by Sonali herself, who has been running a one-woman show with production.
It brings us to another core motive. We want our consumers to have an honest
and unfiltered perspective of what exactly goes into the making of each gear. One of these is the hours spent, and efforts put into building them, and taking good care of their equipment would mean their valuable luggage would last for years to come.
We are constantly creating awareness of conscious consumption by implementing sustainable practices and choosing ethical methods during production
to minimise raw material wastage in every possible way. Furthermore, we creatively recycle and utilise a few fabric cutouts in certain products.
Our job doesn’t end at handing over OSL gear to consumers; we also believe in the 3 R’s—repair, reuse, recycle. So, to commit to that, we offer our repair service for all OSL Gear.
How did your journey begin? Where did you start from, and how has your brand evolved now?
As I walked my path, I wore several hats, the major being a designer and stylist. In addition, I have a good eye for photography and have always loved cooking from the heart.
I leapt from being in fashion, a top polluting industry, realising it wasn’t serving my purpose of being conscious of life. But there were some skills I built while graduating that I passionately loved, which came along my way to being the head seamstress of my business.
A friend once said, “A business could never be independent of its people.” And I indeed agree!
I’ve got to talk about my journey as it thoroughly shaped who I am and what I do. For more than a decade of my life, I’ve dealt with a chronic and progressive skin condition called Hidradenitis Suppurativa, which took control of many factors in my life. As a result, I have been through an unfair share of experiences that imposed challenges to my career, health and well-being. You see, I have never worked a 9-5 job being employed in a physical space in my entire career as I was dealing with a chronic condition.
I’ve worked remotely and freelanced on various projects on and off, but it never 100% satisfied my creativity and passion for creating.
When we finally started working on Our Slug Life gear, the maker in me was born. Since that day, I’ve been immensely blessed with our business, a new energy source. There are still highs and lows with my health, but I’ve gone through a lot of unlearning and am gradually finding ways to balance health and work. It took persistence and faith in myself to accept and complement my reality.
Sudhanshu and I envisioned setting the pace of our business to be suitable for our way of living.
Since the beginning, we have wanted to indulge in Our Slug Life as a venture; now, it has been more than a year of working on it full-time, and there hasn’t been a day without
learning. We’re so fortunate to now be in the stage of planning growth in terms of production and capturing a broader market.
Through Our Slug Life, we have been fortunate to connect with several like-minded souls, individuals on a path to find joy in small things, and cyclists of various genres. We’re so blessed to be able to share parts of ourselves through this beautiful platform we dreamt of and created.
You custom-make the product according to your client’s needs, but do you also incorporate an element of Our Slug Life or just what the customer asks for?
Regarding custom builds, you could get custom-made Our Slug Life gear for yourself in two ways.
1. Pre-order custom: Our design can accommodate your choice of colours. Also, choose whether you’d like extra zipper compartments, a different closure style, etc.
2. A new design from scratch that we could work on according to a provided brief. Here, we can share ideas and create one-of-a-kind gear for Our Slug Lifestyle!
