A house built from a lifetime of collected beauty.
Özel began as a daydream, the design house its founder had been quietly building in her imagination for years, fed by a life spent travelling the world and absorbing its craft, its colour, its beauty. This is the story of why it exists, and of the brother and sister who built it.
Two halves of one house.
A brother and a sister, and two disciplines that rarely share a room. One is devoted to how a thing is made. The other, to how far it can travel.
Shipra Nayyar · Founder
Shipra Nayyar
Shipra Nayyar came to craft by way of the world. A chemical engineer trained at BITS Pilani, Goa, she spent over a decade in global supply chains with Shell, a career that had her living and working across continents and travelling to over twenty countries.
Everywhere it took her, she was quietly collecting something her itinerary never listed: beauty. In the markets, bazaars, and ateliers of each new place, she absorbed the craft of it, the texture of hand-worked cloth, the way colour sits against the light, the quiet fire inside a stone.
A textile house or a tray of loose gemstones affects her the way a gallery affects others. Among colour and raw material she falls into a kind of absorption, almost a reverie, in which finished pieces seem to assemble themselves in her mind, silhouette by silhouette, before she has consciously drawn a line.
Eventually she paused the career that had carried her around the globe to give those visions a home. Özel, established in 2018, is where everything she had gathered, and the inherited craft of India, becomes objects worth keeping. Not souvenirs. Not nostalgia. Wearable art, collected for its soul.
Today she divides her time between India and the United States, and leads the atelier, where every object passes through many hands and takes weeks, not minutes, to finish.
Vishesh Nayyar · Co-Founder
Vishesh Nayyar
If Shipra built the house, Vishesh built the road that carries it to the world. A computer engineer who spent his early career inside Amazon, he learned the machinery of modern commerce from within: how a single product finds its way to a person on the other side of the planet.
His instinct runs in the opposite direction to the bench, which is precisely what a craft house needs. While the atelier perfects one object, Vishesh asks how that object reaches a collector in New York, in London, and other corners of the world where craft is understood, desired, and preserved. Scale, reach, and the architecture of a global brand are his craft.
He and Shipra are brother and sister. Özel is the meeting of their two disciplines: her devotion to how a thing is made, his command of how it travels. One keeps the craft alive. The other makes certain the world gets to keep it.
Özel is my way of placing Indian craft in the world of modern collecting, as objects of desire with shape, soul, and presence.
Our guiding values
Design leadership
Design led by intuition, shaping one piece of wearable art at a time.
Exquisite craftsmanship
Finish is everything. Every piece is handcrafted by master artisans chosen from various corners of India.
Ethical production
Fair work, safe hands, honest materials. We make at a human pace, in conditions we would be proud to show you. Visit us in Hyderabad.
Repair and recycle
An Özel piece is made to be kept and mended, not discarded. We recycle over 70% of textile trims generated.
Design with social impact
Beauty should give something back. Özel exists to support the artisans of India and to train underprivileged women in vocational skills, turning craft into dignified, lasting livelihoods. Every object sold till date has supported our karigars provide education, healthcare and a better quality of life to their children and families.
Made, slowly, by master artisans.
Özel is made in a bungalow atelier by master artisans drawn from different corners of India. Each piece passes through many skilled hands over many days, made one object at a time, the way the craft was always meant to be practised.