Meera Raghavan
Founder & Creative Director
Trained as an architect, retrained as a binder. Meera draws every format we make and still sews the first copy of each new edition herself.
The atelier
A room, a window, a bench
Ten years of making fewer things properly, in a former textile godown in Bengaluru with very good north light.
Our story
We started because we could not buy the notebook we wanted
In 2016 there were two kinds of notebook available in India: the cheap and the imported. Nothing in between was made with any real regard for how paper behaves under a nib, or how a spine survives a monsoon.
So we bought a second-hand sewing frame, ordered a hundred mill samples, and spent eight months getting one book wrong. The hundred-and-first was right, and we have been refining that same book ever since.
Ten years on we are eleven people. We still make everything ourselves, we still name the mill for every stock we sell, and we still take any Redickaa book back for repair, however old, at no charge. It is not a marketing position. It is simply what happens when you would rather make one good thing than a hundred forgettable ones.
2016
Founded in Bengaluru
11
People at the benches
35
Pieces in the catalogue
∞
Free repairs, for life
Craftsmanship
How a book is actually made
Six weeks from mill sheet to finished book, most of it spent waiting for things to dry, rest or settle.
01
Folding
Sheets are folded into signatures by hand and pressed overnight. A machine can do this faster; it cannot feel the grain direction.
02
Sewing
Each signature is sewn onto linen tapes on the frame. This is why the book opens flat and why the spine will not crack in ten years.
03
Rounding & backing
The spine is hammered into a gentle curve so the block holds its shape as the paper takes ink and swells.
04
Casing in
Boards, cloth or hide are cut, pared, glued and pressed. The book then rests for four days before it is touched again.
Materials
Four things, sourced carefully
Paper
FSC-certified stocks from three mills, two in India and one in Germany. Cream laid, ivory wove, cotton rag and toned kraft — each chosen for how it behaves under a wet nib, not for how it photographs.
Leather
Vegetable-tanned in Tuscany over six weeks using tree bark rather than chrome salts. Slower, more expensive, and the only way to get a hide that ages into something better.
Brass
Solid, unlacquered, turned from a single billet so it patinas rather than flakes. Every fitting we use can be unscrewed and replaced.
Cloth & thread
Linen woven in Kerala, washed twice before binding. Waxed linen thread for sewing, cotton head and tail bands, water-based adhesives throughout.
The people
Who makes it
Anand Iyer
Master Binder
Thirty-one years in the trade, the last ten at our bench. Anand can tell a mill by the sound a sheet makes when you fold it, which we have tested and stopped doubting.
Fatima Sheikh
Head of Materials
Sources every hide, cloth and stock we use, and maintains the mill register that lets us name the origin of every material on every product page.
The years
Ten of them, briefly
Nothing dramatic — just a slow accumulation of better decisions about materials and the people who work them.
2016
One room, one sewing frame
Redickaa began above a printer's shop in Shivajinagar with a second-hand sewing frame, a stack of mill samples and no plan beyond making a hundred good notebooks.
2018
The first leather
A trip to a Tuscan tannery ended a two-year search for a hide that would darken rather than crack. The Leather Series followed six months later.
2020
The bindery
We moved to a former textile godown with north light and room for a proof press, and started taking on apprentices from the printing trade.
2023
Repairs, for good
We began accepting any Redickaa book back for free rebinding, whatever its age. It has cost us money and won us more customers than any advertisement.
2026
Ten years, and slower than ever
A catalogue we can still count on two hands and a bit, eleven people at the benches, and the same refusal to hurry the parts that matter.
Where we are going
Smaller, slower, better documented
We have no interest in growing into a large company. The ambition is narrower and harder: to know the origin of every gram of material we use, to train four more binders properly, and to still be repairing the books we made in 2016 forty years from now.
In their words
The correspondence
Letters worth opening
Essays from the bindery, first sight of limited releases, and ₹500 towards your first order over ₹3,000. Two letters a month, never more.
