Maachis: The Bengaluru Brand Turning Matchboxes Into Collectible Home Decor

There was a time when matchboxes were too commonplace. They were in our kitchens, corner paan shops, tea stalls and inside drawers, their tiny labels carrying tigers, goddesses, cars, flowers, film stars, and animal figures. They were made to be used and thrown away.

Maachis, an art revival project, wants you to save yours. This is luxury with a sense of humour: an object that was once disposable is now something you buy to flaunt and keep. It has been rendered value through design, craft, story, and the pleasure of owning something unexpectedly beautiful.

The Bengaluru design brand, founded by Sonal Nagwani and Kevin Thomas, takes the modest matchbox and turns it into a collectible, design object and keepsake. Their handcrafted wooden boxes, priced at around Rs 999, are small enough to fit in your hand but designed to be displayed comfortably on a shelf, coffee table, or bedside table long after the last match is gone.

Nagwani’s interest in matchboxes goes back to childhood. She grew up in a family with many smokers and began collecting the discarded boxes. She would even use the boxes to make miniature furniture. When her parents moved cities, however, the collection was thrown away. Years later, after leaving her 9-5 job, she began pursuing her passion. “It was like an old love reignited,” she says.

She began looking at old matchbox labels again and wondering if it could take on a new avatar that would be durable. “We started putting it online, and people liked it,” says the designer. The boxes are made from wood, with magnetic closures, and come in bright, playful colour combinations. There is a strong visual connection to the India of the 1980s and 1990s: red, yellow, black, bold type, and the slightly eccentric graphics that drew from calendars, matchboxes, and posters of yore.

The nostalgia is clearly getting a lot of attention not just in India but abroad too. The matchboxes used to be available in an Indian cafe called Kurumbu in Amsterdam.

Anti Nazar, Sundari and 11:11 have emerged as particularly appealing designs for Gen Z, while Bullet Rani, with its woman riding a motorbike, has also found a lot of takers. The ideas are familiar, but the language is contemporary.

“Anti Nazar” is a good example. Rather than simply calling it Nazar Battu, Nagwani chose a phrase that felt more playful and current. 11:11 plays on manifestation culture; Bullet Rani turns the familiar image of the woman as passenger into one of control. Sundari challenges the traditional ideas of beauty.

Nagwani researches the old labels, speaks to collectors, and looks at what they reveal about the period in which they were made. “Matchboxes were responsible for a lot of graphic design improvements,” she says, pointing to their fonts, compositions and visual language. “The basic nature of a matchbox is to represent the times they lived in. Most creative matchboxes were made during pre-independent India,” states Nagwani.

According to Google Arts and Culture, during the Swadeshi movement, labels carried Mahatma Gandhi, the charkha, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and images of Bharat Mata and Hind Devi. The cheap, easily accessible matchbox became an affordable way to carry political and cultural imagery into homes.

Swedish Matchbox brand Safety Matches, whose products were sold in India, used these imagery. Nagwani is piqued by that connection between the object and its era. It is also why she does not see Maachis as simply a nostalgia brand. “The point is that we only make those designs that say something about the person who is buying it,” she says. For her, the matchbox should be a little more than a pretty thing. It should say something about its owner.

For her conversation that her design object may stir up, would be real luxury here. Not price, precious materials, or exclusivity, but the pleasure of owning an object that makes someone ask about it. With Diwali around the corner, Maachis is leaning into that idea of gifting. After its earlier Diwali collaboration with designer Payal Khandwala, the brand is working with a fashion label again this season and exploring customised festive hampers.

A handcrafted matchbox makes for an unusual Diwali gift because Indians are still largely used to light diyas, candles, and lamps. A matchbox, though useful and familiar, is slightly unexpected. Nagwani is already thinking beyond matchboxes, with plans of diversifying into the wider home-and-living space. “Matchbox was just the starting,” she says.