The Birth of Suepla

A few years ago, I traveled to the Dai villages of Dehong. Not for work. Just to see the mountains, the rivers, the bamboo groves.

In a village called Manghe, I met an old woman. She sat beneath her stilted house, sunlight filtering through the bamboo leaves, falling onto her hands.

She was weaving. Beside her, a bamboo basket held strips of torn fabric—old sarongs, faded indigo-dyed cloth, scraps from worn cotton shirts.

I asked what she was weaving.

“Sakiori,” she said. “Old cloth, rewoven.”

I asked why she used old fabric.

She smiled. “We never waste. Old things that can still be used—we weave them into something new. I’ve been doing this my whole life.”

In that moment, I realized: this is the oldest form of circular economy. Long before “sustainability” became a word, the weavers of Dehong had been practicing it for centuries.

I went back again and again. Each time, I noticed fewer weavers.

Not because they didn’t want to weave. But because there was no one to buy. Tourists wanted shiny things, machine-made things, cheap things. Sakiori takes too long—ten days, sometimes more—for a single piece of cloth. Yet it sold for less than a factory-made T-shirt.

Young women stopped learning. A month of factory work paid more than a year of weaving.

The grandmothers still sat at their looms. But the cloth they made piled up in cupboards, unsold, unseen.

I thought: if no one buys, they will stop weaving. And if they stop, this craft will disappear. And those old fabrics—they will be thrown away.

So I began making bags. Totes, buckets, clutches—all from their cloth. I didn’t want to change the cloth. The cloth was already perfect. I just wanted to shape it into something people would carry into their daily lives. Something that would not be wasted.

Finding a name took time.

Then a friend from Dehong told me a word in the Dai language: ᥔᥦᥙᥘ (suep).

It means to continue, to inherit, to pass down.

Sakiori is old cloth given new life. The craft itself is passed from mother to daughter, from grandmother to granddaughter. That is suep.

I put the word into our name.

Suepla.

Let the craft continue. Let old fabric live again.