Kiran Khatanhar bootstrapped KKATHA Accessories in Mumbai, and took it to Cannes

Some founders set out to build a company. Kiran Khatanhar set out to rebuild her own life, and a company grew out of it. In late 2024, after more than twelve years in public relations and brand marketing, she stepped away from an established career to start something entirely her own: KKATHA Accessories, a handcrafted-jewellery label based in Mumbai.

Early life

Kiran grew up in Thane, just outside Mumbai. There was little in those early years to point obviously towards jewellery design, her path would run first through science, and then through marketing, but a love of jewellery, by her own account, was always quietly there.

Education

She studied the sciences first, earning an M.Tech in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, before following her interest in brands into an MBA in Marketing, both in Mumbai. It is an unusual pairing, and in hindsight a fitting one: a mind comfortable with both rigour and creativity, and never quite content to stay in a single lane.

Career before KKATHA Accessories

For more than twelve years, Kiran built a wide-ranging career in public relations and brand marketing. Her work spanned brands and companies including FILA, HRX, Adfactors PR, Gozoop and BIG FM, as well as gaming companies including Warner Bros. and Rockstar Games. It was a career with genuine reach: her gaming work took her to Taiwan for the launch of Grand Theft Auto V, and her fashion work took her to Milan Fashion Week with FILA. Through all of it, she was learning one craft especially well, how to tell a brand’s story, and make people care about it. Few marketing careers move so freely between such different worlds, a sportswear label, a global video game, a radio network and a fashion house each ask for a different instinct, and what stayed constant through all of it was the underlying discipline: reading an audience, shaping a story, and earning attention rather than buying it.

Why she started KKATHA Accessories

And then life shifted. Kiran’s health, and becoming a mother, changed how she saw her work and what she wanted from it. A conventional PR career, however successful, no longer fit the life she was trying to build for herself and her family. Jewellery, long a personal passion, offered a way forward. For years, her travels had given her a habit: picking up pieces along the way, a bracelet here, a ring there, a potli from a market she’d stumbled into, each one carrying the memory and feeling of where it came from. Those pieces were never just accessories. They were small, personal stories. KKATHA, founded in Mumbai in late 2024, grew out of that collecting instinct and that turning point together.

“KKATHA was never built to sell jewellery. It was built to give voice to women who’ve lived stories they didn’t always get to tell.”

Kiran describes it as a brand “for women who choose to begin again”, women who rebuild, rediscover themselves, and create life on their own terms. Each handcrafted piece is designed to feel personal and timeless, emotionally connected to the woman who wears it. That idea sits at the centre of everything the brand makes, pieces curated and created to carry meaning rather than simply finish an outfit. As a founder, a mother and a woman rebuilding her life on her own terms, she wanted the brand itself to stand for what she was reaching for: strength, individuality, and a modern, self-assured femininity.

The early days

Like most founders, Kiran’s hardest early stretch had little to do with the product. The real work was quieter: building the right team, and the right foundation beneath the brand, the website, the day-to-day operations, the people. Finding collaborators who genuinely understood what she was trying to create took patience. But that is the work a brand is built on, and she says it is finally coming together, the right people and the right rhythm settling into place, organically. For someone who had spent more than a decade making other brands look effortless, it was a grounding lesson: a brand is only ever as steady as the team and the systems beneath it, and that part cannot be rushed.

The KKATHA collection

The range KKATHA makes is deliberately wide, earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings and traditional Indian potlis, each crafted by hand from stones chosen for what they bring to a piece, not just how they look. Amazonite, Amethyst, Pearls, Rose Quartz, Labradorite, Moonstone, solar druzy and vibrant glass stones all find their way into the work. Some of the most loved designs, the Amazonite danglers and the Amethyst chand-ballis, have been part of KKATHA since the brand’s earliest days. The Druzy Stone Bracelet is another signature piece: druzy stones, with their crystalline light-catching surfaces, mean no two pieces are exactly alike. Across the Stone and Story collection and beyond, the approach is consistent, materials are responsibly sourced, every item is handcrafted with care, and the stone is always allowed to take centre stage.

How KKATHA is funded

KKATHA is completely bootstrapped. Kiran has funded and built the company herself, and runs it with a deliberately light footprint, working with freelancers and independent creative professionals rather than carrying a large fixed team, which keeps the brand nimble as it finds its feet. Its jewellery reaches customers through KKATHA’s own online store alongside marketplaces including Amazon and Nykaa, and Kiran is steadily widening that reach, into more marketplace platforms, and into select B2B partnerships.

Kiran Khatanhar’s net worth and ownership

KKATHA Accessories is a young company, founded only in late 2024, and Kiran has funded and built it herself, without outside investment. So there is no valuation or net-worth figure attached to her name, and that is exactly what you would expect of a brand still in its early chapters. What she owns is something simpler: a company that is entirely hers, built from her own savings and on her own terms. Its worth, for now, is best measured in what it is becoming.

Growth so far

If KKATHA has moved quickly for a young, bootstrapped brand, a few choices help explain it. Kiran has kept the company lean by design, working with a flexible network of freelancers rather than taking on the weight of a large team too early. She has built distribution on more than one footing, pairing the reach of marketplaces like Amazon and Nykaa with a direct online store, where the brand can build its own relationship with customers. And she leans, naturally, on the craft she knows best: after twelve years of telling other brands’ stories, she is now telling her own. Her care for the customer experience comes from the same place. Kiran is clear that it reaches well beyond the product itself, from timely shipping to responsive after-sales support, the aim is for every customer to feel genuinely looked after, and to trust the brand enough to return to it. In jewellery, she believes, trust matters as much as the piece itself, and for a young, bootstrapped label every well-handled order is a small, compounding act of brand-building.

KKATHA Accessories at the Cannes Film Festival

That instinct for storytelling found its brightest moment so far at the Cannes Film Festival. When the team representing Meet Kaur reached out, Kiran was genuinely excited, and sent across some of KKATHA’s finest handcrafted pieces. Kaur wore the brand’s handcrafted Chandpath earrings on the red carpet. For a label not yet two years old, run on freelance talent and the founder’s own savings, seeing KKATHA on an international stage was, in Kiran’s words, a truly proud moment.

What Kiran Khatanhar’s story teaches Indian founders

At heart, Kiran Khatanhar’s story is an encouraging one for anyone thinking about starting over. She did not discard her old career so much as carry its best part forward, twelve years of brand-building skill, redirected into something of her own. Her journey is a reminder that a mid-career change can be a beginning rather than a loss, and that a brand built patiently, with the right people and a steady hand on the everyday operations, gives the storytelling the time it needs to find its audience.

Frequently asked questions about Kiran Khatanhar and KKATHA Accessories

Who is Kiran Khatanhar?

Kiran Khatanhar is an Indian entrepreneur and the founder of KKATHA Accessories, a Mumbai-based handcrafted-jewellery brand. Before founding KKATHA in late 2024, she spent more than twelve years in public relations and brand marketing, working with brands and companies including FILA, HRX, Adfactors PR, Gozoop, BIG FM, Warner Bros. and Rockstar Games.

What is KKATHA Accessories?

KKATHA Accessories is a handcrafted fashion-jewellery brand founded in Mumbai in late 2024. It is built around storytelling and self-expression, jewellery for “women who choose to begin again”, and sells through its own online store as well as marketplaces including Amazon and Nykaa.

Is KKATHA Accessories bootstrapped or funded?

KKATHA Accessories is completely bootstrapped. It has not raised external investment; Kiran Khatanhar has funded and built the company herself, running it with a lean, freelancer-led model.

What is Kiran Khatanhar’s net worth?

There is no public net-worth figure for Kiran Khatanhar, simply because KKATHA Accessories is a young, bootstrapped company she funded and built herself, there is no outside valuation or disclosed financials to point to. What she owns is a brand that is entirely her own, still early in its journey.

What can founders learn from Kiran Khatanhar?

That a mid-career change can be a beginning rather than a setback when you carry your strongest skill into it, Kiran redirected twelve years of brand-marketing experience into her own company, and that a bootstrapped brand grows on patient foundations: the right team, a lean cost base and a genuine focus on the customer.