Matsyo is a Bengaluru-based linen store that specializes in home textiles, offering a range of products from table runners to bath towels. Our collections embrace techniques from Indigenous rural communities, showcasing their rich traditions and craftsmanship. We believe in providing quality linens that enhance your home while honoring cultural heritage.
Who We Are
The Matsyo collections celebrate indigenous techniques and processes used by traditional communities. These products represent the stories of the people who make them and their knowledge over generations in their own habitat. The Matsyo collections symbolize this journey with respect for these people, their work cultures, and their ecosystems. Our products are the manifestation of this appreciation, even as they have been designed for people pursuing a connected way of living, and are styled in simplicity and subtle nuances and their ecosystems.
From the founder
The seed of Matsyo was sown in thoughts about migration. The contemporary world itself is a result of human migrations, beginning with the first journeys Out of Africa. My own life has been marked by migration, as I have moved across India since 1995 to study and work, sharing spaces with migrant workers on factory floors and witnessing their lives shaped by dislocation and resilience.In contrast, the communities I encountered across the country, makers of textiles, utilitarian goods, and ritual objects, lived in harmony with their lands. Their rhythm followed the seasons, their knowledge was rooted, and their creations carried that sense of balance. I brought fragments of this harmony into my own life: beans from a Himalayan village after a trek, a stone sculpture, and lore of a central Indian deity discovered during a memorable holiday, or a quilt stitched together with sarongs collected from towns across southern India. These experiences were pilgrimages; each encounter was a way of weaving human stories into my own journey.Matsyo grew from these reflections. Gagan suggested the name; it loosely means “fish.” I had already been working with a fish logo, which I had once named after Mekonen, a driver who guided me through Lalibela in Ethiopia, a place close to my heart. Appropriating the fish as Matsyo, I imagined Mekonen as a storyteller: carrying forward the voices of people who make, and connecting them with those who admire and acquire their work. This is the spirit of Matsyo, a continuum of people, places, and practices flowing into each other like water.Every collaboration carries the memory of hands and landscapes. Drawing from rich vernacular practices while co-creating for today’s needs, Matsyo nurtures connections that transcend the transactional. Guided by sustainability and collaboration, it is less a storehouse of things and more a continuum of people, practices, and possibilities.
JLX, founder and creative director of Matsyo