Running a Family Business: A Trip to the Print Studio with the Kids

There's a particular kind of chaos to travelling to India with small children in tow - suitcases that come home fuller than they left, at least one missed nap on the way to the studio, someone always needing the loo the moment we arrive. And yet every trip, when it's time to visit the printers, I bring the kids with me.

Rosie Dalia is a family business in the truest sense, and running one means the line between work and home is never especially clean - which, most days, I've come to think is the whole point. I want my children to grow up understanding what the business actually is: not a line on a website, but a room full of people they've met, doing work they've watched with their own eyes.

So instead of leaving them behind, they come with me to the studio - past the courtyard where the cotton is laid out to dry, into the room where the printers work, each bent over long tables, stamping pattern after pattern by hand. My son knows the blocks now: how to hold one, where to press, how much ink is too much. My daughter, still young enough to need steadying hands nearby, presses her own patterns onto scrap paper while she watches everyone else work.

It's a fantastic, slightly unrepeatable kind of education. There's no lesson plan for watching a single block being pressed onto cotton the same way, over and over, until a whole length of fabric becomes one continuous, unbroken pattern, or for realising that the tablecloth on your own table at home was made by people whose faces you know.

We'll keep bringing them back. Not because they're much help yet!  But because this is how I want to create the family business together: not by telling my children it exists, but by taking them to stand in the room where things are made.