After getting her bachelor’s degree in fashion management at the LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore, Gujral returned to India to help in the family business. She also landed a marketing job at luxury fashion brand Dior.

“It was an exciting time – who wouldn’t be thrilled to work at Dior?” Gujral said. “But I had the worst shopping habits and the least respect for clothes.

“I owned so many items and discarded them easily. I didn’t stop to think about who created the pieces, whose hands weaved the leathers and fabrics together.”

She left Dior three years later and headed to Milan, Italy, for her master’s degree in fashion management at the SDA Bocconi School of Management. The lure of luxury fashion had dimmed by then and Gujral was thinking of following in her grandmother’s footsteps and starting a clothing brand of her own.  

A pivotal moment came in one of her first classes in Milan. A professor asked the class: “Who made your clothes?”

That simple question catapulted her back to her childhood, she said. “I’d see all the clothes around me and I knew: My mum made this sari, my Nani made that kurta, the tailor named Tahir designed that fabric.

“It was then when I knew that whatever fashion business I started, I wanted to place the humans behind the clothes at the forefront.”

KNOWING THE HANDS BEHIND THE FABRICS