How India's $88bn apparel industry will go global

Shruti Jaipuria has never been a stranger to fashion. Born into a family of silk traders, she decided to break new ground in 2012 when she co-founded Varchasv, a retail brand focusing on high-end women's fashion wear and accessories. By steering Varchasv towards high-net-worth clients, Shruti led the business through a 140% YOY revenue increase by the second year of operations.

Yet, despite this early success, something felt missing. Varchasv was just one brand in the vast $88bn Indian apparel market, a business segment estimated to reach $117.05bn by 2034.

The opportunity was clear enough for Shruti to make her next bet in Project SatatKi, a fashion business consultancy which has worked with 100+ Indian slow fashion brands to get into global stores and franchises.

BOIn: You grew up in a business family connected to a reputed silk textile manufacturing and export company, and your first venture was in women's fashion retail where you executed a strategy revamp that drove a 140% revenue increase in your second year.

What did it actually feel like to build commercial success so early, building upon that family legacy? What made you eventually move beyond it to build something else entirely?

SJ: The number reads cleanly now, but it did not feel that way while it was happening because Varchasv was not exactly a broken business. It was a business running on instinct, the way most fashion businesses run in year one. We were buying what we liked, selling what we could, and not really looking at what was sitting on the rack quietly losing us money. The second year was less about a new idea and more about finally looking at what's actually selling, what's dead stock dressed up as range, what we were pricing on habit instead of on what the customer would pay. We stopped buying for ourselves and started buying for "her". The revenue moved once those decisions moved.

I wasn't scared of the commercial side, and I think that came from home. In a silk export family, margins and buyers and paperwork are dinner-table conversation. My grandfather never went to a buyer without knowing his floor price first. So I grew up understanding that the business is not the enemy of the product. What surprised me, once I was inside fashion, was how few people believed that.

I left because retail was solving the problem once, for one brand, but I kept seeing the same problem everywhere. I would often meet and connect with designers who had real taste and demand, but the business underneath seemed to get heavier with every season because nobody had built it to hold sustainable weight. Once I saw that pattern enough times, I started to get more interested in fixing it from the ground up rather than just for myself and what I was doing at Varchasv.

BOIn: Speaking of that problem-solving streak, you went from Jain University's business management program to a Master's in Fashion Retail Management at London College of Fashion, the world's top-ranked fashion business school. What were you hoping that specific combination would unlock for you, and did it deliver what you expected, or did the real education happen afterward, in the actual work?

SJ: I think I went that route because I really wanted the vocabulary of both worlds. Business management gave me comfort with numbers and systems, so when I went to LCF, I was subconsciously expecting the fashion half to complete the picture for me.

What it gave me instead was an argument. The whole year I was at the London College of Fashion, I sat through classes where India was discussed as a place where things are 'manufactured'. The conversation was always cost, capacity, compliance. Nobody was speaking of us as a place where things are designed, and I sat in those rooms knowing the craft and design intelligence we have at home. Instead, I repeatedly watched it get filed under sourcing. That gap is the thing I came back with, rather than just the certificate.

Once I had that clear sense of what was being undersold, the real education was after.

You can study range planning in a classroom. You only understand it when you're sitting with a founder who has forty styles, no logic connecting them, and a buyer meeting in three weeks.

The school gave me the initial frame, but it was the hundred-odd brands after that taught me where the frame actually bends under the reality of the market and how to adapt to match those local conditions.

BOIn: That's an incredible insight, Shruti. You've described the core problem you see again and again at Project Satatki: fashion founders with strong design, sold-out collections, and press coverage, whose businesses still feel stalled every season because the structure underneath isn't there.

After working with over 100 brands across nearly a decade, what's the earliest warning sign you now recognise immediately, the thing that tells you a brand is heading toward exactly that wall, even before the founder sees it themselves?

SJ: When the founder can describe every collection in detail but cannot describe a single decision rule.

They'll walk me through the inspiration, the fabric, the shoot, the press. Then, I ask, "Why eight colours and not four? Why this price? Why this buyer?" The answer is always some version of "It felt right." Designers are very creative people, so that underlying taste often gets them in the room; however, the absence of a decision system is exactly where the key problems arise.

The tell underneath the tell is that the founder is still the entire operating system. Every pricing call, every production fire, every buyer reply goes through one person. Sometimes that can look like dedication when it's actually the ceiling, because a brand cannot outgrow the person who is doing all of its thinking. I can usually see that wall a year before the founder feels it, because I've watched the same brand twenty times and I know from experience that the pressure won't come all at once. It hits hardest on the day demand arrives, and there's no team, system, or structure to absorb it.

BOIn: You've argued that most Indian designer fashion founders are building their go-to-market like a D2C skincare company with conversion funnels, Meta ads, and Shopify when the actual customer discovers and trusts these brands through pop-ups and in-person styling.

What does a go-to-market strategy actually look like when you build it around occasion and trust rather than algorithmic discovery, and how do you help a founder unlearn the D2C playbook they've absorbed by default?

SJ: The D2C playbook assumes a stranger finds you through an ad, trusts you in one scroll, and checks out alone. The Indian designer customer almost never behaves that way. She discovers the brand at a friend's wedding, gets styled in person, asks two questions over WhatsApp at 11 pm, and buys because someone she trusts already vouched for the brand. That is a completely different distribution logic. So when a founder shows me their Meta ad spend and their funnel, my first question is usually where the actual sales are closing. Almost always, it's the trunk show, the boutique, the founder's own phone.

When it is built around occasion and trust, the go-to-market strategy looks different. You plan around the festive and wedding calendar instead of a content calendar. You treat the stockist and the stylist as your real acquisition channel because they carry the trust you can't manufacture in an ad. You treat WhatsApp as a sales channel with structure, not just a chaotic inbox. And you stop measuring success by reach and start measuring it by reorder and retention.

The unlearning is the hard part, because the D2C model is everywhere and it feels modern. I don't tell founders to abandon it. Instead, I ask them to look honestly at where the money actually comes in, and to stop spending against a journey their customer isn't taking.

BOIn: Looking deeper into your own business strategy, Project SatatKi started as a fashion consultancy and is now becoming an AI-backed platform for global wholesale, while you continue the consulting work in parallel. You've described the platform as "the long game" and the consulting as where you sit closest to founders, making real decisions.

How do you think about the relationship between those two? Does the consulting work directly inform what you're building into the platform, and is there a point where the platform has to take over what you currently do in person?

SJ: The consulting is where I'm in the room. Real money, real risk, a founder across the table deciding whether to trust me on a price or a buyer. That's where I find out what's actually broken, which is seldom what looks broken from the outside. And yes, the platform is the long game. It's an attempt to take the thing I keep fixing by hand and make it usable for more people than I can personally sit with.

They are not really two separate projects because the platform is being built out of consulting. Every piece of it, from the pricing logic to the range planning and the way global wholesale actually works once you're past the showcase, came from watching founders get stuck in the same places over and over. I wouldn't know how to build it otherwise.

You can't automate a process you've never had to do by hand at midnight before a buyer meeting.

People assume the goal is for the platform to replace what I do. I don't see it that way, and not because I'm precious about it. A good part of this work is the part designers call the "business shrink" part. It's confidence, holding up a mirror and having a founder admitting out loud that yes, she's afraid to price her own work. A platform can't do that, and it shouldn't pretend to. What it can do is carry the repeatable scaffolding so that the human hours go where they're actually needed.

And honestly, the whole point of the work has never been to make a founder dependent on me. It's the opposite. If a brand needs SatatKi forever, I've failed. The platform is just that belief at scale. Make the founder self-reliant. Bring some calm to the chaos and then get out of the way.

BOIn: You've pushed back directly on the idea that "untapped market gaps" in Indian fashion categories like adaptive wear, postpartum, and fashion for women over 40 are empty categories, pointing out that several are already crowded and arguing that the deeper error is defining a market by a label rather than designing for a person.

What do you think is driving that tendency to mistake a label for a market, and what would Indian fashion look like if more founders designed for the person instead?

SJ: Most of those so-called untapped gaps aren't empty. Adaptive wear, postpartum, fashion for women over forty- several of them already have real, serious brands competing. So "untapped" is often just "I haven't looked properly."

The deeper error is designing for a label instead of a person. "Women over 40" is not a customer. It's a census category. It tells you nothing about how she lives, what occasions she dresses for, what she's tired of, what she'll happily pay for. The tendency comes from how we're taught to look for markets, from the top down, in segments, the way a deck presents them. A label feels like a strategy because it sounds like an opportunity. It's much harder to sit with one real person and her actual wardrobe problem.

If more founders designed for the person, you'd see fewer collections built to claim a segment and more built to solve something specific. The specificity is also what travels. The brands of ours that work globally aren't the ones chasing a broad category. They're the ones who know exactly who they're for and refuse to blur it.

BOIn: Speaking of global scale, you've written that Indian designers are producing extraordinary creative work but arriving at the international stage without the commercial systems to scale.

Why do you think that system has remained so underbuilt in India specifically, when the design talent itself is, by your own account, world-class? Is it an education gap, a capital gap, or something more cultural about how craft and commerce are seen to relate to each other here?

SJ: Actually, it's not one gap; it's three sitting on top of one another. There's an education gap, because design schools teach you to make beautiful things and almost no one teaches pricing as positioning, range as architecture, or a buyer relationship as a long-term system. There's a capital gap, because most independent designers are funding growth out of last season's sales, which makes it very hard to invest in structure before you need it. But the deepest one, truly, is cultural.

In India, craft and commerce are often treated as opposites.

There's a quiet belief that being serious about money makes you less serious about art. So the business side gets treated as something slightly grubby, to be handled later, by someone else. That's exactly backwards. The structure is what lets the craft survive long enough to matter. The most culturally rich houses I admire are also commercially disciplined. One protects the other.

Talent was never the question. We have generational depth in textile and design. What we under-invested in was the unglamorous machinery that lets that talent show up reliably, season after season, in front of a buyer who needs to trust you'll deliver.

BOIn: You've spent a large part of your career proving that Indian fashion can be legible to global buyers without losing what makes it Indian. As more of that system now gets automated through AI tools, and simultaneously, interest in "Designed in India" rather than just "Made in India" potentially grows, what does the future of independent Indian fashion look like to you on the world stage?

What do you think the next generation of designers will need to understand that the current generation had to learn the hard way?

SJ: The argument shifting from 'Made in India' to 'Designed in India' is very relevant commercially.

When the world treats you as a manufacturer, you compete on price and volume. When it treats you as a design house, you compete on point of view. The brands that have travelled, the ones built on genuine textile intelligence and cultural memory, didn't get there by looking less 'Indian'. They got there by becoming more specifically themselves and more disciplined underneath.

Then, as more of the system automates, the tools stop being the advantage. AI will clean your line sheet, sort your data, speed up the boring parts. It does nothing for a brand whose pricing is a guess and whose range has no logic. Technology rewards the brands that already have a clear system, but it also exposes the ones that don't.

So, what the next generation needs to understand earlier than we did is this. The systems are not the enemy of creativity. They're what let the creativity leave the studio. My generation learned that the hard way, season by season, usually after something broke.

If the people coming up treat the business architecture as part of the craft instead of a tax on it, they'll get to the global stage years sooner, and once they are there, they'll still be standing.

Connect with Shruti on LinkedIn and check out Project SatatKi!