You may have spotted something different recently. The light in the photographs, the small things on the site, a new mark on the swing tag. This is something we have been planning for months.
We've been quiet about it on the website. Behind the scenes, we've been thinking. And working. Part of that work has been reshooting every single product in the range, so that the look across the brand would feel coherent — one world, top to bottom.
Not about the bags themselves. The bags are made by the same hands they've always been made by, in the same workshops in Rajasthan, on the same cotton, with the same heavy wooden blocks. None of that is changing — and from us, none of it will.
The shift is in how we frame the brand. The lens. The look. The voice. A new logo is part of it. So is the way the photographs feel — a little less performative, a little closer to home. So is the language we're starting to use. We wanted to freshen things up and walk down a road that, to be honest, feels more like us.
This is a short note on why.
A Slight Unease
Nikki, who started CYC, is Irish. She has lived in Asia for nearly a decade now and visiting for far longer than that. She studied Sanskrit, sat with teachers, spent long stretches inside Indian workshops, and built her doctoral work on contemplative traditions that come — partly — from this part of the world. She is currently undertaking a second doctorate at an Indian university. She knows the place she works in. She loves it.
And still, for a long time, it has quietly not sat right with her to position CYC as an Indian brand.
Not because the craft isn't Indian — it is, deeply, and we will keep saying that loudly. The block-printers in Rajasthan are the soul of every piece. But because Nikki herself is not. She is Irish.
With that she has felt for some time that she wanted to take the brand in a direction that represented the things that inspire her. She had several businesses before this one — one of them was house clearances, which is how she first came to spend long days around old furniture, old textiles, and other people's art. She doesn't claim to have a particularly trained eye for any of it. The beauty of art, in her view, is that it isn't a test — it's a preference. You know what you like.
One thing she found herself drawn to, again and again, was the kind of mid-twentieth-century lifestyle photography that captured a particular sun-drenched, slightly fictional version of the world — society portraits, poolside afternoons, the European holiday before mass tourism ever touched it. She loved it then. She still does. It has quietly shaped how she sees a room, a print, a bag in the corner of a frame. That sun-drenched part of the world is, fittingly, the part many people in India reference when they picture where she is from.
Before CYC, Nikki lived in a lot of places. One of them was the Mediterranean coast, where much of her family still lives, and where she spent several years restoring and flipping houses. The light, the materials, the way a room could hold both linen and limewash and a deep, painterly print — that has always been part of her visual language. It still is.
To present CYC as if it were a pure expression of Indian aesthetic life — through an Irish founder's lens, sold mostly to customers in Europe, SE Asia and the United States — has always carried a faint discomfort. The kind you can sit with for years before you realise it was there.
We're not interested in performance. So we stopped.
What's actually true about CYC
What's true is that this brand sits in the mix.
It is hand-block-printed in Rajasthan by artisans who have been doing this for generations. It is designed by an Irish woman who has lived in Asia for a decade and on the Mediterranean for years before that. It is registered as an Irish company. It is carried by customers across Europe and the United States. It is photographed and styled by a team that get yelled at by an Irish woman to create an aesthetic that draws on every place its founder has lived in.
That's the truth of the object. It belongs to more than one place.
So the refresh is really just us telling the truth about what the brand always was. The craft stays exactly where it lives — in Rajasthan, in the hands of the artisans, in the blocks and the dye and the cotton. The frame around it changes — to the actual mixed-cultural world the bags live inside.
The mix of worlds is the brand. We were always going to get here.
What's new, and what isn't
What's new:
- A refreshed logo. Same name (we love it; you may already love it) — but a cleaner visual mark, a monogram that can sit on a swing tag or a cushion edge without shouting.
- A new visual direction. We won't describe it in detail; we'd rather you notice it. It owes a quiet debt to that mid-century photographic tradition Nikki fell for years ago, and to the Mediterranean houses she spent her twenties moving through. It reflects the actual worlds the brand and its founder live in.
- A new way of talking about ourselves. Less explanation, more story. Less here is the thing, more here is the world the thing lives in.
What isn't:
- The makers. The same artisans in the same workshops, paid the same fair wage, supported by the same percentage of profits that go back to children's education and seed-bank initiatives.
- The prints. The Tibetan tiger, the jungle, the leopard, the lobster, the stripes, the suzani. All hand-block-printed. All carrying the same lineage they always did. (If you want the long story on the prints, our Reading the Prints field guide and Reading the Stripes field guide walk through each one.)
- The quietness. We still believe in slow. We still believe in objects you keep. We still believe the future of meaningful things is traceability and intimacy.
What we hope this feels like
We hope this feels like an old friend who has settled into herself a little more. Same person. Same craft. Same care. Just a clearer sense of who she is in the world.
The bag in your hand belongs to a workshop in Rajasthan, an Irish business, a founder shaped by every coast and country she has lived in, and a customer who could be anywhere from Cork to California. It belongs, in the end, to wherever you carry it.
That's the mix of worlds. We're glad you're here.
With love,
Conscious Yoga Collective
Read more on how the bags are made in The Quiet Workshops of Rajasthan, or browse Reading the Prints and Reading the Stripes for the long story behind the patterns.