Our Story

Hi, I’m Dhriti and this is Root & Still

“Me, somewhere in Sikkim, India. Where most of my best ideas happen.”

I’m from Kolkata, India, and I moved to the UK in 2024. If you know Kolkata, you already understand a part of me. It’s a city that grabs you by the collar from the day you’re born, loud, brilliant, opinionated, full of art, conversation, and the kind of food you keep thinking about long after you’ve left. It doesn’t produce passive people. It can’t. The city won’t let you.

But growing up in that kind of beautiful chaos does something else too. It creates a deep, almost desperate need for stillness.

I don’t remember exactly when I fell in love with the mountains. It feels like it was always there. There’s something about being at altitude, breathing in cold air, standing under prayer flags, looking out over a valley that seems endless, that strips everything back. The noise fades. The constant thinking slows down. You’re just there, present in a way that’s hard to explain until you’ve felt it.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the Eastern Himalayas, in places like Sikkim and Darjeeling, in quiet monastery towns where Buddhist philosophy isn’t something people discuss, it’s something they live. Life moves slower. More deliberately. There’s a quiet respect for time, for nature, for everything that came before and everything that will outlast us.

That way of living stayed with me. The idea that presence matters more than pace. That how you do something is just as important as what you do. That rushing through the good parts of life is its own kind of loss.

I carried that feeling back with me to Kolkata every single time, and now, I carry it with me here in the UK as well.

I spent years working in marketing, building businesses, moving fast, always chasing the next milestone. I enjoy it, and I’m good at it. But somewhere along the way, I realised there was a gap between the way I worked and the way I wanted to live.

Root & Still came from that gap.

I wanted to create something that felt like the mountains feel to me. Calm, considered, honest. Something that doesn’t try too hard to be seen, but feels right when you experience it. A brand that doesn’t chase trends, but focuses on creating pieces that actually mean something and last beyond a moment.

The name felt obvious once I understood what I was trying to build.

Root comes from where I’m from. Kolkata, its culture, its intensity, its depth. It’s a part of everything I do whether I try or not.

Still comes from the mountains, from those quiet moments where everything slows down and you remember what really matters.

Root & Still sits somewhere between those two worlds.

It’s not just about how a space looks, it’s about how it feels. It’s about creating small moments of calm in the middle of everyday life. A corner, a room, a pause.

If what we create can give you even a little bit of that feeling, then it’s doing exactly what it’s meant to do.