Our story
A love letter to Gujarat, built by the people who never stopped missing it.
I Love Gujarat started the way most good ideas do — with a feeling nobody could quite put into words. This is the story of how that feeling became a marketplace, a directory, and a way home.
Not a slogan. A promise — worn, shared, and sent home.
Every state deserves a mark people are proud to wear. Ours borrows a page from the campaigns that turned three words into a feeling people carried with them for life — except our "I" isn't a logo on a t-shirt. It's a working directory, a marketplace, and a travel desk, because loving a place should come with somewhere to put that love to use.
Founder's note
"I kept a suitcase half-packed with Gujarat for twenty years."
I left Ahmedabad at twenty-two with one Bandhani dupatta folded into the bottom of my suitcase — a gift from my grandmother, who told me it would "keep the house with you." It did. Every place I lived after that, it came out for Navratri, for weddings, for the nights I needed to feel less far away.
What I didn't have was a place to send that feeling back — no single address for the artisans who made things like it, the businesses run by people who understood exactly what I meant when I said "home," or a way to plan a trip back that felt like more than a checklist of monuments.
I Love Gujarat is the address I wished existed. A shop stocked by the people actually doing the weaving and the dyeing. A directory built with — not just about — the business community. A travel desk that treats the Rann of Kutch and a plate of dhokla with the same seriousness. One home, for however far you've traveled from it.
— Founder, I Love Gujarat
What we stand for
Three commitments behind everything we build.
Every vertical on this site — Shop, Directory, Tours — answers to the same three standards.
Source it honestly
Every product is credited to the artisan or region that made it. GI-tagged crafts are labeled as such, and licensed partners are named, not hidden behind a house brand.
Build with the community
The directory is populated with — and verified alongside — Gujarat's own business associations, not scraped from the internet and left unclaimed.
Design for every kind of distance
Whether you're twelve time zones away, planning your first visit, or running a business two streets from Manek Chowk, the site meets you where you actually are.
How we got here
From a folded dupatta to a full marketplace.
A feeling with nowhere to go
Years of sending home-made requests to relatives — "can you bring me a proper Patola" — turn into a running list of everything the diaspora keeps asking for.
Three verticals, one address
Rather than build another gift shop, the idea widens: a marketplace for makers, a directory for the business community, and a desk for the trip home.
Built in the open, with the community
Listings are sourced with partners like GCCI, products are credited to named artisans, and the site is built to grow one honest relationship at a time.
However you love Gujarat, there's a place for it here.
Shop the makers, find your people in the directory, or start planning the trip you've been putting off.