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From Ritu Kumar’s 1969 boutique to today’s couture.
11 stories in Fashion
An architect and trained painter noticed that Indian women surround themselves with art everywhere except on the bag they carry every day. Strokes began with hand-painted face masks.
She turned down an IIM Calcutta seat for fashion school and declined a place in her father’s perfume business. Then she found that most women’s shoes sold in India were built on foot shapes from somewhere else.
Hand block printing has been practised around Jaipur for centuries and is mostly sold as the same few things. A textile designer stuck at home during the pandemic put it somewhere it had not been.
She was pulled out of school in class 8 and married at 17. She began with ten women, a hundred rupees each and a second-hand sewing machine. Today the embroidery of Barmer feeds tens of thousands of households, and Harvard has asked her to explain how.
Two sisters with no background in textiles quit secure corporate jobs in 2016, pooled a few lakh rupees, and started buying sarees directly from weavers. Bootstrapped throughout, Suta reported revenue of about ₹56 crore in FY2022–23 and works with thousands of weavers across India.
A working television actress used her own audience to launch a direct-to-consumer ethnic-wear label, an Instagram-first, founder-curated brand built without an investor deck or a celebrity-licensing deal.
She raised seed capital from 1,000 rural artisans at ₹1,000 each, registered the company on a co-ownership thesis no Indian bank would underwrite, and grew it into a producer-owned business that supplies IKEA and FabIndia.
A western fast-fashion brand for Indian women that found its largest opportunity in fusion-ethnic wear.
She founded Universal Sportsbiz to build owned brands around stars, most visibly WROGN with Virat Kohli, instead of renting their faces for ads.
From two sewing machines in Mumbai in 1995 to AND, Global Desi, Anita Dongre couture, the Grassroot crafts label and Pinkcity jewellery, hers is one of Indian fashion’s most layered founder stories.
Trained in art history and museum studies, Ritu Kumar set up a small hand-block-printing boutique in 1969. Five decades later, the label spans couture, prêt and accessories, and she is widely regarded as the architect of modern Indian fashion.
From Ritu Kumar’s 1969 boutique to today’s couture.
We've published 11 stories in Fashion so far, newest first, and add more as we research and verify new founders.
Yes. Every founder we profile is a woman founder or co-founder, and we confirm that — along with the company's key facts — across multiple independent sources before a story goes live.
