Get in touch with usIf you’ve ever run your hands across one of our towels and thought, “How is this even made?”, here’s a small window into the answer: by human beings standing at looms, weaving with patience, skill, and a rhythm that stretches back centuries.
In traditional Turkish homes, it was the mother who taught the children. Weaving wasn’t something you “learned” — it was something you absorbed by being there, growing up beside the loom while watching your mother’s hands move day after day. But that tradition came to a hard stop.
When machine-made textiles began flooding the cities, and eventually the villages, consumer habits changed. Türkiye is one of the largest textile producers in the world, and suddenly machine-woven towels and bedsheets were everywhere — faster, cheaper, easier to find. The home loom became unnecessary. And in one fell swoop, mothers stopped weaving, the looms left the home, and we lost not only our women in weaving — we lost our teachers.
That maternal link — the one that quietly passed knowledge from one generation to the next — was broken.
Today, in the workshops we support, everything still depends on the presence of the weaver. Nothing moves without them. The looms fall completely silent when it’s time for lunch or a tea break — not because there’s a pause in the system, but because the loom is the human. Without hands to guide the shuttle, there is no progress.
Weaving a single piece takes anywhere from several hours to four or five full shifts — longer if the threads are uncooperative. Compare that to a small factory machine that can produce 4,000 pestamel in one week. But here’s the real kicker: one person can supervise 30 to 40 of those machines at the same time. That’s up to 160,000 pestamel a week… overseen by a single human, strolling between aisles with a cup of tea. If there’s an issue, they press pause, fix the thread, and start it again.
It’s no wonder people have forgotten how long real weaving takes. And honestly? Sometimes we’re afraid we won’t have enough. That’s why, no matter what — bombings, lockdowns, earthquakes, you name it — we’ve never slowed things down. We know how fragile this craft is, and how easily it could be lost again.
We haven’t saved it. Not yet. What we’re doing right now is sustaining it — by paying more than fair wages, supporting the remaining masters, and dreaming of a day when we can train new weavers again. But for that, we need to build a weaving school — and for that, we need more land.
So the next time someone asks you what’s so special about your Jennifer’s Hamam towel, you can smile and say,
“Well, it’s a bit of a miracle, really.”
Because it is.
And when you visit our shops, or climb the stairs to the third-floor looped towel room, we hope you remember:
Nothing you see is ordinary. Every piece is a quiet triumph — woven against the odds, and kept alive, one thread at a time.