Our Story

Indus Terracotta is a workshop of six or seven people in Muthanampalayam, near Tiruppur. We make terracotta jewellery — necklace sets, chokers, earrings — the way it has been made across Tamil Nadu for generations, which is to say slowly and by hand.

We are not a family business with a long history behind it. We are a small group of people who learned to work clay properly and decided that was worth doing well.

Why clay

Terracotta has been worn here for a very long time, at temple festivals and weddings and on ordinary days when a saree wanted something warmer than metal. It fell out of fashion for a while because metal was easier to mass-produce.

Clay has an advantage metal cannot match. A full temple-style haaram in metal sits heavy on the neck within an hour. Ours weighs between 60 and 110 grams — light enough that brides wear a complete set from the morning ceremony through to the reception without taking it off.

It takes colour too. Metal gives you gold or silver. Clay can be mixed to any shade, which is why we can match a set to a saree you already own.

How we work

Clay comes from the Cauvery basin. It is wedged by hand to work the air out, then rolled bead by bead between the palms. Nothing is pressed into a mould, which means no two beads on a strand are precisely the same size — and that small irregularity is what tells the eye a person made it.

Pieces dry in shade for two days, then in full sun, so they dry evenly and do not crack. Then eight hours in the kiln at high heat, which is what makes terracotta hard and permanent.

Painting is the slow part. Colour is mixed into the clay before firing so it holds at every bead edge instead of thinning where a brush would lift. Gold is built in successive coats afterwards and knocked back deliberately, so it reads as old metal rather than fresh paint. Kemp stones are set one at a time — on a dense bridal pendant that is slower than the firing itself.

Six days, start to finish. Not six minutes.

What we will not do

No nickel, no lead, no plating. There is nothing in a piece to wear through and start marking your skin, because there is no coating over a base metal — the colour is in the clay body.

We do not fire colours that will not hold. Fluorescents break down at high heat, so we do not offer them. Teal and blue shift under kiln heat, so those come in small batches and we tell you plainly that a restock will not match exactly. We would rather say that before you order than after.

Colour matching

Send a photo of your saree on WhatsApp and we will mix the base tone to match. Custom orders take about four weeks.

Sometimes the honest advice is not to match. An exact match against plain silk can read flat, and matching one colour out of five on a printed saree usually looks arbitrary. We will tell you that too.

Where we are

Saranam, Ayyappa Nagar, 440/4 Vaikkal Meedu, Muthanampalayam, Tamil Nadu 641608. We ship across India and worldwide. Visits are by appointment — message us first.