Āne (pronounced aah-nay) means elephant in Tulu and Kannada. An old presence from my childhood, woven into memory. Our ancestral coffee estate is in Arehalli, in the Western Ghats, in the elephant corridor and elephants- both wild, and working, have always been a very real part of that landscape. They are revered, loved and feared in equal measure.

I wanted to pay homage to these giants that live among us, but the more I thought about it, I realized that the elephant wasn’t just a reference to the landscape but a philosophy for how I wanted Āne to behave.

My intention was to build a brand that carries the story of its land- its climate, its people and its rhythm- with sourcing rooted in care, traceability and respect.  Like the elephant its named after- Āne moves deliberately. It does not rush. It remembers. There is something about that quality of being- grounded, observant, quietly powerrfyl- that felt right for the brand.

That then became a visual philosophy for Āne. Grounded, visually calm, precise and no-nonsense. Nothing ornamental for the sake of it. I wanted the brand to have a quiet confidence and honesty- to feel like it belongs to the landscape it comes from, rather than trying to perform what a coffee brand is supposed to look like.

I also wanted to resist the tendency to over-stylize. There is a lot of beauty in the everyday here- a steel tumbler, a handwritten note, Kannada script, laterite soil, an old coffee sack, bugs, misty mornings, family photographs, filtered forest light. Those things felt much more truthful to the brand than a conventional coffee aesthetic and even our website www.ane.life is designed as a journal to be explored with real, movable objects from around our estate home, rather than a conventional commerce site. Nothing exists because it looks beautiful. It exists because it already belonged.

Our line “We go where the land leads us”, is probably the simplest expression of that philosophy.

It made me much more conscious of how much exists behind something as ordinary as a cup of coffee. 

When you are removed from the source of a product, it is very easy to think of it as a commodity. Being connected to the land makes that impossible. You see the amount of time, patience, labour, weather, uncertainty and accumulated knowledge that goes into getting something from plant to a cup.

It’s also made me think about ownership differently. The brand may be ours but the story isn’t. The land, the people who tended it, the knowledge that has been passed down generations, all of that existed before us and will exist long after.

I think our responsibility is to carry that story forward honestly and respectfully, without trying to make it more glamorous or more convenient than it really is. For me, Āne is about creating a way for people to see, understand and hopefully value a little more of what was there all along.

I think the interesting thing happening in Indian coffee right now is that we are beginning to understand that there isn’t one Indian coffee story.

For a long time, coffee was either treated as a commodity or presented through a very particular idea of specialty coffee that could sometimes feel quite removed from how most Indians actually drink coffee.

I wanted Āne to bring those worlds together- to care deeply about where the coffee comes from, how it is grown and made, while still holding on to familiarity. To the joy of making coffee and feeding it to people who come home. Because having coffee is never really about just coffee, is it? Or we’d be doing shots and moving on.

It’s about the moment you create- a quiet pause, suspended in time; a space to converse or reflect while relishing a familiar, deeply comforting taste. The ritual is what makes coffee so beautiful.

The decision to include chicory in our filter blend was very conscious. The flavour memory of South Indian filter coffee is deeply ingrained in me. There is something incredibly comforting about the body and gentle nuttyness that chicory brings, especially with milk. I didn’t want to remove that familiarity in the pursuit of making something feel more “specialty”.
I also realised that the blend makes a fantastic latte or cortado. You don’t need a South Indian filter to enjoy it. I’d love for more coffee drinkers to experiment with it in a Moka pot, French press or whatever they already brew with, and not feel constrained by the word “filter”.
I think we’ve spent a long time assuming that if something is familiar, it can’t also be sophisticated. I don’t believe those things are opposites.

At the same time, I wanted Āne to have another side- our 100% Arabica single-origin coffee, available as both beans and ground, which allows the character of the coffee itself and the place it comes from to come through more clearly. I was also quite particular about not overwhelming the Āne customer with the noise of a hundred options. We begin with just these two coffees, both shaped by decades of roasting experience and by the coffee we’ve been drinking at home for years.

Sometimes the right answer isn’t more choice. It’s sharing the ones you already love. And that same thinking extended beyond the coffee itself. If coffee can become part of someone’s daily ritual, I wondered whether stories could too.

So alongside the coffee, we created ‘Friends of Āne.’ It’s a monthly subscription, though I never really think of it that way. I think of it as correspondence.

Every month, we send freshly roasted coffee together with something we’ll never sell on its own: the Āne Print Club- letters, photographs, illustrations and little objects, things designed to be folded, reread and kept. 

It’s also given us a small group of people who have become friends of the brand, in the last two months since launch- people we can experiment with, including sending out micro-lots and play roasts before we put them out more widely.

Because ultimately, I don’t want Āne to be only about coffee. I want it to be about the land and the hand that made the coffee. The coffee is simply the way you get to experience that.

Coffee has always been part of my life, but I think building Āne has made me much more aware of it.

Earlier, coffee was a ritual I participated in without really questioning it. Now I think about the plant, the harvest, the people, the roast, the brewing method, the cup itself. I’ve become much more interested in the journey of the coffee, and everything that sits between the plant and the cup. I’ve also become much more experimental with recipes- different brewing methods etc. It’s opened the world of coffee up for me to play in, and ‘play’ is  the space I'm happiest in- taking something I’ve known all my life and discovering that there are still so many ways to experience it.

Fashion taught me something I carry into everything I make. Luxury isn’t about price. It’s about intention. It’s about slowing someone down for a moment. Making them notice. Remember. Feel something. That’s what I wanted Āne to do.With HUEMN, we spent years building a point of view- not just designing clothes. We are interested in what the clothes say about the time we are living in, about identity, culture and the people wearing them. That instinct hasn’t changed, What has changed, is me.

I’m much less interested in proving something with this. Or creating a ‘buzz’. I’m more patient. I’m softer. I’m ok in my vulnerable humanness. Especially because Āne is so connected to something personal, I think I’m also much more protective of authenticity.

With fashion, you can imagine a world and then build it. With coffee, the land comes first. You can’t force it to become something it isn’t. It is what it is. With you or without. You are just a conduit to its story.

And actually, Ane began in a much simpler way. I’ve always brought back coffee for my friends and I made this brand just to do that in a more seamless manner.

The brand came later than the desire to share it.

I’ve never really thought of what I do as being about a particular category. I’ve always been interested in culture, objects, rituals and the way people build meaning around everyday things. Fashion was one medium for that. Coffee is another.

The connection, for me, is in world-building.

With both Huemn and Āne, I’ve been drawn to creating something with a very strong point of view- something that has a sense of place and makes you feel beyond the product itself.

And in that sense,  coffee feels very natural to me because of how tactile it is. The packaging, the smell, the ritual of opening it, brewing it, sitting down with it. The print club that’s part of Āne . There is a whole sensory world around it.

With coffee, you’re not inventing meaning from scratch, you’re revealing what’s already there.

That’s what I find exciting about it. The job of the brand is to create a way for someone else to enter that world.

So fashion and coffee might seem like very different worlds, but for me they meet in that space of intention and experience. 

I’d love for Indian coffee to be understood on its own terms.

We don’t always have to borrow language, aesthetics or ideas of sophistication from elsewhere to make something feel valuable. There is an enormous amount of knowledge, history, craftsmanship and quality within Indian coffee already.

And I think we’ve sometimes created a false distinction between what is familiar and what is sophisticated. I’d love to see us become more confident in understanding that they can exist together.

But I also don’t want “Indian coffee” to become a narrow idea. India has so many growing regions, producers, traditions and ways of drinking coffee. There isn’t one Indian coffee story, and I think that diversity is part of what makes it exciting. If Āne can contribute in a small way to making people more curious about those stories- both within India and outside it- I’d be very happy.

With HUEMN, I wanted people to look at Indian fashion and understand that it didn’t need to be validated by the outside world to be relevant. I think I feel something similar about Āne.

I’d love for Indian coffee to travel, but without having to lose any of itself along the way. And unlike 15 years ago, there is a lot of pride today in products that we are making in India. That’s very exciting to me.

Definitely. I think the inflection point was actually becoming a mother.

Having a child gave me a completely new appreciation for my body and for what it is capable of. It also made me much more conscious of what we put into it. I became insanely particular about what I was buying- traceability, quality, provenance of ingredients etc Suddenly all of this became very important to me.

And then one trip to Arehalli last year led to conversations with the other local growers, the village co-operative and the people who have been part of this landscape for generations. I came back seeing the place differently. I had the land and the story, and I had spent most of my career building brands. Suddenly, it felt like the two things had found each other at the right moment.

Earlier in my career, I was always driven by momentum. There was always another collection, another season, another thing to build. You could move very quickly.

Āne doesn’t allow that. The land decides. The harvest decides. The weather decides. You learn very quickly that not everything can be accelerated simply because you want it to be.

I think I’m also less interested now in building something simply because I can. I’m much more interested in meaning, value, slowness. Right now, I’m particularly driven by the idea of building conscious food- food that is real, considered, traceable and made with an awareness of where it comes from. I think this is a space that India needs a lot of work in.

My husband and I have set up a company called Tomorrow Table, under which Āne operates. The name says a lot about what we’re trying to build: a table for the foods of tomorrow - real and clean, but also deeply enjoyable and rooted in our culture and history.

So yes, Āne has asked something different of me. It has asked me to slow down, to listen more, and to appreciate value created slowly.