A Thriving Custom Design Brand Birthed from Family Tradition

By Andrea Hendricks

IN Diamond Housing Scheme, the workday can begin long before the rest of the neighbourhood is fully awake. Fabric is measured, thread is matched, and a name is checked again before it is stitched into a sash that will be worn once and remembered for years. For 35-year-old Meera Sukhdeo, those careful details are the heartbeat of Stitches and Sash Mee, the home-based business she founded and still leads as its creative force.

The brand has grown around life’s big moments. Custom apparel and hand-knitted craft souvenirs, such as personalised graduation attire, pageant sashes and keepsakes, are among her signature pieces. Each order carries a deadline and a story. Sometimes a proud family celebrating a graduate, sometimes a customer searching for a gift that feels personal rather than mass-produced.

Sukhdeo traces her love for making things back to her home, where she learned textile work and sewing through lessons from her grandmother, who made the Sunflower bucket hats.

“My grandmother-in-law taught me the craft skills,” Sukhdeo told this publication, recalling early hours spent watching, practising and trying again until her hands learned what her eyes already admired. That passion became more permanent with family support: her aunt bought her first embroidery machine, and her grandfather bought her first sewing machine. It was the kind of encouragement, Sukhdeo recalled in an interview, that can change a person’s confidence, an investment that quietly says, this is real, and you can do it.

Today, she is building the business while raising a family, and she is quick to acknowledge the team behind her. When work piles up, especially during the rush of graduation and pageantry season, her husband steps in to help and, just as importantly, to keep things moving. She says he assists when there is an overload of work and encourages her to find the simplest way through difficult tasks. Her three children, she added, are daily motivation as she works to support her household with additional income.

The pace is not always gentle. Sukhdeo speaks candidly about balancing long hours with family responsibilities and the pressure that comes with project deadlines. There are nights when sleep is cut short and mornings that arrive too quickly. Beyond the physical work of sewing and assembling pieces, she has also taken on an entirely different kind of learning: mastering graphic-design software and other technical demands—skills that require patience, practice and plenty of trial and error.

Still, what keeps her going is not only ambition, but the moment the work leaves her hands and meets a customer’s eyes. She says she often fully appreciates a piece only when it is finished and the client expresses gratitude. On graduation day, for example, or when someone receives a personalised gift for a milestone anniversary, those reactions are proof that the time and precision mattered.

Sukhdeo also makes a bold claim about her niche: “As one of Guyana’s top sash designers, I enjoy supplying these items during graduation and pageantry season,” she told this publication. That demand has helped shape the business into a local, personalised alternative to mass-produced items—pieces that carry names, dates, school colours and cultural touches that feel unmistakably one-of-a-kind.

Her work has moved beyond the home studio and into public view. Stitches and Sash Mee has been exhibited at commercial showcases such as the We Lift Expo, and Sukhdeo has launched patriotic cultural collections that include handcrafted embroidered dolls, handbags, sandals and other statement pieces for major exhibitions. The response, she said, has been especially meaningful in a space where art and craft can sometimes feel overlooked. Seeing the brand recognised on a broader stage, she added, has been deeply rewarding.

Looking ahead, Sukhdeo sees room to grow, particularly in the diaspora and pageantry markets, where nostalgia for home can be strong and where custom souvenirs and culturally rooted designs are in demand. With international collaborations and cultural exhibitions offering new pathways, she believes these opportunities could help streamline production and elevate her designs over the long term.

And she is not finished experimenting. Sukhdeo says she is considering expanding into fashion design in the future, adding a new dimension to a business that already bridges tradition and modernity.

If there is a theme she returns to, it is the idea that creativity deserves to be taken seriously—especially by the person who possesses it. She encourages other female entrepreneurs not to minimise the value of their hands-on skills and to pair passion with practical knowledge. Own the craft, she advises, learn the business side, and keep building with discipline and pride—because what begins as a small project at home can grow into something that carries a community’s celebrations, one stitch at a time.

For other women entrepreneurs, Sukhdeo’s story reads like a blueprint for what can be built from a spare room, a reliable machine and a willingness to learn as you go. In a country where many small businesses are started between school drop-offs and late-night chores, her work illustrates how cottage industries can become serious income streams—particularly for women whose skills have traditionally been treated as “hobbies” rather than trades. In quiet ways, the visibility of Stitches and Sash Mee pushes back against that idea, showing that precision handwork, pricing, deadlines and customer service can sit comfortably alongside parenting and community life without either being diminished.

It also underscores the role that customised, home-grown pieces play in how Guyanese mark what matters. A sash with a name and school colour, or a pageant accessory stitched to match a costume made for an anniversary, is not simply an item to be worn or displayed; it is a small record of belonging. For families, those details become part of the story that is told and retold—who graduated, who competed, who returned home for a celebration, and which village or school they represented. In a world of quick online purchases and generic templates, the appeal of her work is that it refuses to be anonymous, rooting each milestone in something recognisably local and personal, shaped by hands that understand the culture behind the request.

That same insistence on specificity is what Sukhdeo hopes will carry her into the next stage. She is already thinking about how to build systems that protect quality while making growth possible—more efficient production, new collaborations and designs that can travel without losing their Guyanese character. The diaspora, she believes, will remain a strong market precisely because distance can sharpen the desire for objects that feel like home. For now, the home studio in Diamond Housing Scheme continues to hum—one order at a time, one carefully stitched name after another—while Sukhdeo plans for a bigger future, but still unmistakably hers.

Contact Stitches and Sash Mee on +592-629-4172, Facebook and Instagram.