Building a Saree Brand for the Modern Woman

About this episode

Taniya and Sujata Biswas didn't discover their idea in a market research report. They discovered it in childhood, in the villages their father took them to instead of vacations, watching weavers work and coming home with two meters of fabric each. Years later, working corporate jobs and wearing handloom sarees that made strangers stop and ask where they got them, they saw the gap: women who loved sarees but had been told they were only for temples and weddings. Suta was their answer.

‍

In this episode of Brewed, the co-founders of Suta walk through what it actually took to build India's most community-driven saree brand, from three years on a Facebook page with headless product photos, to 13 rejections from weavers, to Karan Johar's stylist walking through their garage with the shutter half open. They talk about the discounting mistake they regret, why they never hired a celebrity, and why they think push notifications should be renamed entirely.

‍

This conversation is for brand founders who want to understand what it means to build something with a soul, DTC operators navigating the tension between community and commerce, and anyone who believes that a product can be a medium for the things that actually matter.

‍

What you'll learn

• The Suta story: from weaving villages to a million-strong community
• Validating the idea before quitting: two years of pop-ups and personal deliveries
• 13 rejections and how they built the supply chain from scratch
• Why their own faces became the brand's strongest asset
• The Suta Queens: how to build a community that actually shows up
• The discounting mistake they made and why they regret it
• Clothing as a medium: how Suta speaks about things others won't
• How Suta measures whether a story is actually working
• The broader lesson: think long term in everything you do

‍

The complete breakdown

1. The Suta story: from weaving villages to a million-strong community

Most family vacations involve hotels and tourist spots. The Biswas family's vacations involved trains to wherever the tracks went, strangers who knew their father from work, farmers and weavers and artisans, swimming in ponds and climbing trees. At the end of every trip, their mother would let them each buy two meters of fabric. Then she would ask them to design what they wanted made from it: what kind of sleeve, what kind of pocket, what shape. They knew the story of how the fabric was woven because they had watched it happen.

‍

That stayed with them. They studied engineering and MBAs and went into corporate careers, as people from their background were expected to do. But they kept wearing handloom sarees to work, and people kept stopping them to ask about the softness, the fabric, where it came from. The gap they saw was not a product gap. It was a perception gap. Women who liked sarees had been convinced that sarees were only for temples or weddings. Suta's entire existence is a correction of that idea.

‍

Today Suta has over a million Instagram followers, over a million app users, and a retail presence across 15 cities. The brand is opening its first international store in Mauritius. But the foundation is still the same two meters of fabric and a story about where it came from.

2. Validating the idea before quitting: two years of pop-ups and personal deliveries

Suta officially launched in 2016. But the two years before that, from 2014 to 2016, are where the real story of the brand was written.

‍

Taniya and Sujata did not quit their jobs and then built a business. They built the business while keeping their jobs, learning everything the hard way, and only quit when Suta was paying each of them 20,000 rupees a month. That number, coming from high-paying corporate and B-school salaries, was the signal they had agreed to wait for.

‍

The validation process was relentlessly physical. They did pop-ups. They did customer meets. They took saree orders, noted down the Mumbai delivery addresses, and went themselves to drop off the products, so they could see who was buying and why. They sat with customers in their homes and asked: why did you pick Suta? What brought you back a second time?

‍

"We used to go to all the Mumbai addresses, go deliver the product, to see who the customer is, who likes our product for what. And we spent time with customers in their houses saying why did you pick Suta?"

‍

The Facebook page they ran had no faces on it. Headless photos, neck down, because they had not yet decided to put themselves forward. People were sending money to a bank account based on what they saw in those images. The trust that required still surprises them.

3. 13 rejections and how they built the supply chain from scratch

The product Taniya and Sujata wanted to make was mulmul sarees: incredibly soft, lightweight, breathable. The problem was that almost nobody was weaving them anymore.

‍

They knocked on 13 doors. They were told no thirteen times. The message they received, sometimes stated plainly, was that two young women doing what looked like a college project were not serious customers. They would get married and drop out. What guaranteed steady orders?

‍

Nothing, at that point. But they kept going.

‍

Once they found weavers willing to work with them and started launching collections, the demand signal was fast and clear. Collections would sell out within two to three days. They knew the demand was real. The problem was supply. The next two to three years were spent almost entirely on fixing that: communicating with weavers when they could not travel constantly, ensuring the designs that came back matched the designs they had given, building the systems and relationships that would let them scale without losing quality or intent.

‍

That supply chain work, invisible to customers, is what allowed Suta to grow without the chaos that ends most early-stage brands. The demand was never the risk. The supply was. They fixed the supply first.

4. Why their own faces became the brand's strongest asset

Suta did not put its founders on camera out of strategy. It did so out of necessity.

‍

Professional photography shoots in 2016 cost around 1,000 rupees per product. Outdoor shoots were even more expensive because the lighting was uncontrolled. They could not afford it. They also wanted something raw, something that looked like real life rather than a catalogue. The only option was to do it themselves.

‍

Sujata had never modeled. She stood in front of the camera anyway. Taniya edited the photos. One day while editing she noticed Sujata looked fine and said so. Sujata, distracted, said do whatever you want. Taniya started including her face in the images and the response was immediate. People loved it.

‍

"I look like a girl next door. I dress up without ironing sometimes, without putting too much effort into the way I look. A lot of girls would say that I can look like this. It's achievable."

‍

That was the insight. Previous saree brands had been shot so perfectly, so formally, that they frightened people off. Suta's images showed someone doing home chores, reading, working on a laptop, wearing sneakers with a saree. The message was: this is for your regular life. You can wear this. The product was the same. The permission it gave was completely different.

‍

What came next was never planned. Karan Johar's stylist for Lust Stories found them through Pinterest with the shutter of their garage half open. Anil Kapoor Productions followed. Mani Ratnam Productions followed. Sonakshi Sinha cut the tag off a Suta saree and kept it against her phone with the address written on it, then showed up at their warehouse unannounced. None of it was the result of a celebrity strategy. It was the result of being present, being consistent, and making something that people who cared about aesthetics actually wanted to wear.

‍

"If we had selected a celebrity endorsement early on, it might not have had the same effect we have now. Our customers are not people who would just say, this actress wore it so I have to wear it."

5. The Suta Queens: how to build a community that actually shows up

Suta calls its customers the Queens. Not a loyalty program. Not a cohort. A community with a name that carries a specific belief: if you feel like a queen, you are one. A bathroom selfie with bad lighting counts. The feeling is what matters.

‍

That framing, established before community-building became a marketing term, shaped everything about how Suta engages with its customers. They post user photos regardless of production quality. They do not push discounts through community channels. The job of the community is not to convert. The job is to make every person in it feel genuinely seen.

‍

The measure of whether it worked is not a metric. It is what happens when two Suta customers meet randomly on the street. They do not say they are customers of Suta. They say they are Suta Queens. That distinction, between transactional identity and community identity, is what Taniya and Sujata point to when asked what they got right.

‍

"The moment you have the vision that you're going to mint money out of the community you're building, everything changes and people get it. If you're pushing discounts, pushing numbers, they see it. And the moment you start doing that, you lose the community."

‍

One of the most striking examples of what that community actually means: a customer once wrote to say that she was living with domestic violence and could not leave. The first thing she did every morning was open the Suta Instagram and the Suta app. It gave her hope that the world was also beautiful. That is not a retention metric. That is what it means to build something that matters to people.

6. The discounting mistake they made and why they regret it

Suta started life as a brand that did not discount. The product quality was high, the design was innovative, the prices reflected the value passing through to the artisans. Customers understood this and bought accordingly.

‍

Then the brand grew. Inventory became harder to manage. Lead times stretched. Stock started sitting. And around them, every other brand was running sales.

‍

"We started doing too much discounting because everyone else was doing it. We didn't need to do that. But we were also doing it thinking, some discount is happening, so why will someone come and buy from me?"

‍

Looking back, Taniya is clear that it was a mistake. The Suta customer was not buying because of a discount. She was buying because the product was exceptional and she trusted the brand. The inventory that felt stuck would have sold anyway, because the repeat rates at Suta are very high and the brand loyalty is genuine. The discounting did not accelerate anything meaningful. It just introduced a dynamic that did not belong in the brand's relationship with its customers.

‍

The second mistake in the same category: trying to change the face of the brand. Hiring professional models. Getting a stylist to pleat the sarees perfectly. Making the photography look like other brands. Both times they did it, they fell flat.

‍

"We spent a lot of money, burnt our fingers, and came back to the original. Customers came back and told us. They care about the effort put in, the way the saree is being carried, the stories behind it, and the craft used to make the product."

7. Clothing as a medium: how Suta speaks about things others won't

Suta has run campaigns on LGBTQIA+ inclusion. On autism. On anxiety. On breast cancer. They are planning a menopause campaign. Each one uses clothing as the starting point for a conversation most brands avoid entirely.

‍

The logic behind this is not marketing. It is the same logic that drove Taniya and Sujata from childhood: if you have a voice, use it for the things that matter.

‍

"A lot of people just don't talk about it because there's not enough talk happening around them. So they don't know what to say."

‍

The LGBTQIA+ pride collection incorporated every flag color into the sarees. Someone who is part of the community or an ally can wear it and use it as a way to start a conversation. The autism collection was designed using artwork by Amrit Khurana, a child on the spectrum who photographs moments when she goes out, comes home, and sketches them in geometric patterns. Those sketches went to weavers and became hand-painted sarees. That collection sold out not because the sarees were the most beautiful in the lineup, but because the story behind them was irreplaceable.

‍

The breast cancer campaign placed the four ways to check your breasts inside the blouse tags, where the wearer can see them every time they dress. Awareness embedded into a garment that someone wears every day.

‍

"Clothing is such an integral part of your life. You can actually use it as a medium to talk more about things that matter."

‍

When the pride collection launched, some people unfollowed. Hate messages came in. The graph dipped. Suta did not delete anything or walk it back. The following week the numbers spiked significantly, because the people who shared those values found the brand and stayed.

8. How Suta measures whether a story is actually working

The question of how emotion maps to numbers is one Taniya and Sujata have thought about carefully over ten years of building the brand.

‍

The primary metric is sell-through rate on a collection launch. A story that connects translates directly and quickly into product moving. The autism spectrum collection sold out. The Republic Day campaign, which gave village children paper and asked them what happiness looked like and then turned those drawings into saree prints, sold out. The sarees in those collections were not objectively more beautiful than others in the range. The story made them irreplaceable.

‍

"A lot of times, because of just the story, a product has been sold out. We know it."

‍

The supporting signals are social: views, engagements, shares, the noise created in the days following a campaign launch. Customer calls, where the team that has been with the brand for six or seven years brings direct feedback from conversations into the weekly meetings. Reorder rates, which indicate whether a collection will go into repeat production.

‍

And then there is the P&L signal that confirms everything: when a campaign does well, the cost of advertising comes down because earned attention does the work that paid reach would otherwise have to do. The best Suta campaigns do not need to be boosted. They travel on their own.

‍

"Like a hawk we watch the numbers when it comes to campaign launches, especially collection launches."

9. The broader lesson: think long term in everything you do

The single piece of advice Taniya offers most consistently to younger founders is also the one that has shaped every decision Suta has made across ten years: think long term.

‍

Not as an aspiration. As an operating framework that changes how you hire, how you build systems, how you communicate, and how you evaluate the decisions in front of you.

‍

"Look at your brand only in the long term. Do not think short term. So all the strategies you take, think about it that if four, five years down the line, it will make sense. Whatever you're doing, think long term."

‍

The implications run through everything. If you're opening a store you'll be in for five years, it changes how you choose the location. If your communication is built to last, it doesn't chase trends. If your hiring question is whether someone sticks around or moves constantly, it changes who you bring in. Long-term thinking is not a mood. It is a filter that produces consistently better decisions because the timeframe forces honesty.

‍

The second piece of advice is less obvious but equally important: build real relationships with other founders. Not networking for the sake of having names in a contacts list. Actual friendships with people whose speed dials you are on, who you call when things are going wrong and when things are going right.

‍

Suta is approaching its tenth year. They are opening internationally. The community they built with no budget, no celebrity, and no discounting framework is still the most valuable thing the brand has. That is what long-term thinking produces.

‍

The complete episode transcript

Abhijeet: Welcome to Brewed, the podcast for brand builders, e-commerce CMOs, and marketers who want to know what really goes into building modern brands. Every episode brings you real strategies, honest stories, and people doing the work. Today's guests are Taniya and Sujata Biswas, co-founders of Suta, a brand that has redefined how a modern saree brand can look. Founded in 2016, Suta has grown into a global community of more than a million Instagram followers, more than a million app users, and a retail presence across 15 cities. In this episode we unpack what it really takes to grow a purpose-led brand and how to expand without losing your soul. Welcome Taniya and Sujata.

‍

Taniya and Sujata: Thank you.

‍

Abhijeet: Take us back to where it all started.

‍

Taniya and Sujata: Honestly, it started from our childhood. Our father was in a transferable job and he used to always take us to villages for our holidays, not fancy vacations. He used to say, this is the best vacation you will get. When you come back, you'll have the most stories to tell. So our parents used to take us wherever the train went. We used to get down and stay with farmers, weavers, and artisans, because that's what is most common in the east of India. We used to see weaving happening in front of us. We lived with weavers. And at the end, Ma used to say you can buy two meters of fabric each. We used to come back and she would say, you can design what kind of sleeve you want, what kind of pockets. And we used to get so excited because we knew the story of how the fabric was woven. That stayed with us. We grew up, we studied engineering and MBAs and did different things from what we had really wanted to do. But once we were in corporate, we realized that when we wore sarees, people were very intrigued by the kind of fabric, the softness. And we found a clear gap: women who like sarees but always say, oh I don't wear sarees, sarees are only for temples or for weddings. So we thought maybe that's what we need to do. Suta came together and we said God wants us to do something where our hearts lie. We quit our jobs and started.

‍

Abhijeet: For you, what was the trigger point? How did you validate your idea?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: 2016 is when the brand officially started but we did Suta for two years before that alongside our jobs. 2014 to 2016 is a journey that was the heart, the grit, the whole tears and blood of everything. We did a lot of pop-ups, a lot of customer meets. We used to deliver ourselves. We used to see the orders, go to all the Mumbai addresses, deliver the product, to see who the customer is and who likes our product for what. We spent time with customers in their houses asking why did you pick Suta? And we used to have a Facebook page. We didn't even have our faces on it because Sujata used to model and we used to have headless pictures, neck down, so customers didn't know who was buying. That they trusted enough to send money to a bank account is what we always wondered about. Two to three years we did this with just a Facebook page, then a website. And it was very tough because we used to know nothing about textiles, we got cheated, we were told no very bluntly because we looked like two girls doing a college project. People would say they'll get married and drop out, so what guarantees constant orders? We knocked on 13 doors and everybody said no to us.

‍

Abhijeet: How did you define who the ideal Suta customer was when no online saree brand existed?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: We jumped literally into the ocean knowing nothing. Exhibitions taught us. We saw people picking our products and going. We had sold-out stalls. There was a three-day exhibition where on the second day our stock was over and we had to literally put the curtain down. That was validation. Our customers, we realized, were CEOs coming to buy a 1,200 or 1,300 rupee plain saree that they would wear with absolute grace. The persona was: it will make them feel confident and beautiful, but they will still be in their own skin. Our customer base was very independent, free thinkers. We could not even break it age-wise because it came from varied age groups and varied places. City dwellers and people in tier two and tier three cities, but the way they think is very different. And they also believe in the impact they are creating. Because we work with weavers, they believe in that too. Suta customers would proudly say, even for a 2,000 or 3,000 rupee saree, I'm wearing a Suta, because they believe it's not about the price point but about the cause. I am impacting lives. People saw a win when they saw the brand winning. And that's very rarely seen. We were very transparent in talking about why we are doing what we are doing.

‍

Abhijeet: Why did you put your own faces on the ads and the community? And how did celebrities end up using Suta without any strategy behind it?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: We started doing that because we wanted to save money. We didn't have the budgets for professional shoots, which were quoted at 1,000 rupees per product in 2016. And we wanted a very raw background, not a studio setup. We couldn't afford it, so there was nothing else. No other option but to stand in front of a camera and do what we wanted to do. Sujata was never a model type of person. She used to stand in front of the camera and do her head like that. And I used to edit the pictures, select and edit, and while editing one day I said Sujata your face is looking fine. She was just passing by and didn't hear me properly and said do whatever you want. I started putting her face in the pictures and we got a lot of love for that. Then next shoot I said at least apply some cream, kajal, and lipstick. That's how it started. I realized it was getting attention because I look like a girl next door. I dress up without ironing sometimes. A lot of girls would say that I can look like this, it's achievable. Earlier sarees were so catalogue-like and prim and proper that people would get scared and run away. We could relate to this. A scenario people could relate to. And since we always had this idea that saree has to come back as regular wear, it could not be like standing in front of a palace or a waterfall. It had to be regular, without heels, with canvas shoes, crocs, sneakers, like how our mums and aunts used to actually wear them. Then later, Karan Johar's team reached our garage. It was a shutter-down garage, shutter half open, and the stylist walked in from Ekta Khanna's team. She entered and said Karan sir liked this look. We were like, who is Karan sir? Did you take an appointment? We went, come on, let's do it. We realized Pinterest is such a powerful medium. We got those validations early on. Then Anil Kapoor Productions, Mani Ratnam Productions, they all kept coming. There was absolutely no intention, we didn't know we were reaching where we were reaching. It was again the story, being present across platforms, being visible, and talking about the product. How light it is, how comfortable it is, and the kind of looks we created sitting at home constantly. And also because the brand stood for honesty, people could easily come to us and say they wanted looks and we helped them create those looks. If we had selected a brand endorsement early on, it might not have had the same effect we have now. Our customers are not somebody who would just say, this actress wore it so I have to wear it. Too many actors from Indian cinema have worn Suta. They've worn it. A lot of celebrities tell their stylist that if it's a saree look, go and buy from Suta because the blouse sizes fit me. So it is also coming from all sides.

‍

Abhijeet: What has been your fundamental philosophy of connecting people to the cause? What has been the framework for building community?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: We are going to complete ten years in April. We have always stuck to being our authentic self. We have a couple of values we do not mess with. We started the brand for artisans. The impact is the main reason. We tell every department to understand that and keep artisans on top. For example, if a collection flops, the design team has to gather and quickly create another launch for those artisans so their work is not hampered. It starts from the weavers and we always think from the weavers' point of view. Even if an actress wears a saree, we send the photo back to the weavers saying, hey, you made it and they have worn it, see what impact you have created. Second is having structures, proper numbers that you're watching every day. Looking at cash flows, sell-through rates, the numbers, having right P&Ls and going through them monthly. As a brand keeps growing, if you're not watching from day one, you will never have those numbers. You can't suddenly wake up and say I need everything. Also staying authentic is quite important for any brand because when you're small, something is working and you're moving in a direction, but when you see a lot of clutter and you think I want to be this or that, you lose your identity. That's very difficult. But stick to it because that is the only thing that shines. Otherwise every brand will look the same. Community is something we built without the whole buzzword of community. When we started, we called it Suta Queens, and even now we call it the Queens. We said it because we felt that if a girl feels like a queen, even if it's a bathroom selfie, we post it. Doesn't matter what the background is, it need not be the most edited photo. That is now becoming the trend, unedited photos, no filters. But we started this in 2016 when we went on Instagram. Even now, whenever our customers meet randomly on the road, they don't say I'm a customer of Suta. They say I'm a Suta Queen, I'm part of the community. If you have to build community, that's the only way. You're always thinking what value you're adding, not thinking that you're selling. The moment you have the vision that you're going to mint money out of the community you're building, everything changes and people get it. If you're pushing discounts and pushing numbers, they see it. And the moment you start doing that, you lose the community.

‍

Abhijeet: Any one lesson or failure you can share from ten years of community building?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: I think one thing that I would say was a big mistake was when we started, we were against discounts. We knew that the kind of pricing we do, the kind of value we pass on to the weavers, and the great quality products we produce, the innovative design, people see value in it. So we knew we were not a discounting brand. But later through the journey, when we became bigger, when you have inventory misses and you're building a lot of inventory, the lead time is high and you sit on stock. I understand now why brands do discounting. We started doing too much discounting because everyone else was doing it. We didn't need to do that. We were doing it because some discount is being offered everywhere, so why will someone come and buy from me? Looking back, my customer base was not buying because I was discounting. They would have bought anyway. My product quality is great. It was not that my product is aging badly and I have to discount to finish it off. But that was a mistake, getting into that race. And still I know that any of these products, even if not discounted, will sell the same way because our repeat rates are very, very high. Another mistake was trying to change the face of the brand. We tried it a couple of times and failed. We tried shooting with a different model, styled the sarees very neatly pleated, got a stylist. Everything was against the initial idea of the brand and we fell flat on our faces. We spent a lot of money, burnt our fingers, and came back to the original. Customers came back and told us. They care about the effort put in, the way we are carrying the saree, the stories behind it, and the craft used to make the product.

‍

Abhijeet: Suta speaks up on LGBTQIA+, autism, breast cancer, menopause. What was the thinking behind it and how did it go?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: We have always spoken our heart about things we actually believe in. We were always outsiders growing up, always changing schools, seven schools and five schools for each of us, different states, different languages, no common friends. That experience of being an outsider and the concept of acceptance was a big pain point for us. We learned a lot. We became very adaptable. The Suta community was created because of that. If you feel pretty in your head, we will tell you thumbs up, you are looking pretty. Same for the LGBTQIA community. We also ran a campaign for kids with Autism Spectrum. Our sarees were named things like Anger, different names related to emotions, and we spoke about anxiety issues. We felt sarees could be a medium for telling stories. We are also going to launch menopause sarees. People are not talking enough about it. LGBTQIA is part of us, they live with us, they are part of us. Just because I don't know about it doesn't mean I look away and live in denial. We create content stories around it so that clothing becomes a talking point and discussion happens. A garment accompanying you throughout the day should not just be something you wear. It's something you express through. You tell people about your personality through how you dress. Every garment should have a story. Since Suta has a big community and a voice, if even two people change their mindset or join our voices and make it bigger, we can do so much more than just selling sarees. We did the pride flag colors incorporated into the sarees. We introduced the pink breast cancer tag in our blouses where whoever is wearing the blouse will see the four ways to check your breasts. Just awareness. Clothing being such an integral part of your life, you can use it as a medium to talk more about things that matter. When we launched the pride collection, a lot of people unfollowed us and it was a downward graph. But we didn't remove anything, we didn't delete anything. There was a spike the next week, immense, because we stuck to something we really believe in. People will come back, they'll understand our voices, and that's what happens when we do something that is never about selling. Things turn around. People see the authenticity and then they come back.

‍

Abhijeet: How do you measure whether a story is actually working?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: Very simple. We see the sell-through rate of the launch for each product. A lot of times, because of just the story, a product has been sold out. The saree from the autism spectrum campaign with Amrit Khurana, a child who takes pictures when she steps out because she doesn't interact with people but watches things in a different way, comes home and sketches those images in very geometric, colorful patterns. We sent those sketches to our artisans and they hand-painted them on the sarees. That collection was so much in demand it got sold out. It was nothing to do with how the sarees objectively looked. There were a lot of collections that are pretty. But that sold out. We also see views, engagements on social media. The chats, the number of shares. The noise that gets created through that span. And then the sell-through rate. Together we know if it's a hit or not. A lot of products go on reorder, so we know it. The whole purchase orders will come to us for approval and we know how brilliantly something has contributed to the P&L. Once a campaign does well, the whole cost of advertisement comes down. So we measure it like a hawk, especially for collection launches. Even calls, customers literally call and talk. Our customer support team is made up of people who have been six or seven years with the company, veterans, and they come and give feedback in our weekly meetings on what people had to say.

‍

Abhijeet: What convinced you to build an app and what has been the learning?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: People engage with us a lot. We always thought our garments should have a story and their own voice. What happens is mobile web becomes very transactional. If you have to go back to it, you have to enter again. It's a very transactional space. App becomes like a home, a personal space where people can spend a lot of time whenever they want to. Whenever they are bored, whenever they want a break, a lot of our Suta Queens go to the Suta app. In exhibitions we have met kids and husbands who say, mere beti ke phone mein I always see you. People keep it open. They say work from home, the kid is like, aunty I keep seeing you on my mother's phone. It's like a stress buster for people to come and see what's new. Just to see the styling, just to see a new launch, engage with us. A lot of people do a lot of wishlisting. And one more example of how people are so in love with Suta: someone wrote saying, I go through domestic violence in my house. The first thing I do is get up in the morning, open Suta's Instagram, open the app, and see you because you give me hope that the world is also beautiful. I can't step out. But just seeing you gives me hope. Imagine how powerful a page can be. A safe space that is also interacting and talking to you. Hence we feel our page should always communicate a message and should never be pushing things down your throat. Mobile web becomes transactional. App becomes home.

‍

Abhijeet: How do you think about push notifications and what kind of experience app users want differently from website users?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: They have downloaded the app already, which means you have a special place in their heart and phone. That means you have to give them special care and attention. It may be in terms of special offers or special previews. But I do not think people have downloaded your app because of a 200 rupee offer. That is not the incentive. People who have stayed on the app really like the brand and come back to buy. That shows they are in love and will be shopping more. Their lifetime value increases. And about push notifications, the term only sounds very crude and wrong and bad. I think it should change. Push notification sounds like I'm pushing something down your throat. A nice reminder would be better. DM is such a cute word. Something like that. Because the term is like that, everyone actually pushes things. When I get those notifications from some apps I can turn them off. But for Suta, people don't turn them off. They have given that special space in their life for Suta. So I do not want to misuse it. We don't push too much. We only say when there is a nice announcement to make that will add real value. Something like a message that will brighten your day, or a reminder that hey you can come check things in the app, something which adds value to their life. Not something to just push offers and increase sales. They're so in love that they'll come anyway. It just needs good navigation. Whatever they want to find, they can find. It's like a whisper in your ear. A special something that I'm sending just to you. That's how we use our app and it's working really well.

‍

Abhijeet: What founder mindset would you advise your younger self to have?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: One I would say is look at your brand only in the long term. Do not think short term. All the strategies you take, think about whether four or five years down the line they will make sense. Whatever you're doing, think long term. Your communication will change when you are thinking long term. It will not be just trend. You will send a message out, your language will start changing. Your systems you're building will go in that direction. Your hiring will change. When you're hiring, your first question will be to see if the person has stuck around or is moving constantly. Systems, processes, hiring, just think long term. Yeah, it works better even if you're selling a year or two years later. I think another thing is that networking really helps, not networking just for the sake of having a name on your phone. Being friends with a couple of founders really helped us. We have numbers on our speed dials and when things are going wrong or right, we can always reach out. Build a strong system around you of founders or mentors. It really works.

‍

Abhijeet: How do you imagine Suta in 2099?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: I feel if I see Suta as a brand, I think it will still be known as a very honest brand with branches all across the world where sarees are celebrated as one of the best garments in the world and no longer seen as just Indian wear. Even now we see international orders coming from people who are not Indian. I feel that's very, very important. The scientific reasons for why sarees were born should be celebrated all across the world, like how yoga is celebrated. Sarees should be up there as one of the best attire absolutely. And Suta is opening its first international store in Mauritius next month. I think Suta will take sarees to places along with a lot of brands who have started sarees. Since sarees are so fluid, they should travel the whole world. Without any stitches, just nicely flowing around.

‍

Abhijeet: Two DTC brand founders you admire?

‍

Taniya and Sujata: I always name founders I know personally and reach out to quite often. One is Disha, who is the founder of Zouk. I have loved the brand from the day they started. I love the way they have been building it, husband and wife together, Pradeep and Disha. I see them building and they inspire me. There are so many bag brands but I spot that bag anywhere and recognize it. It's made in India, impeccable quality, and people are carrying it. In airports it's flooded with Zouk bags. I'm amazed at how they have built it. The second one I was going to say is Steve Jobs, because the way he created the iPhone. We never thought there could be one button and life would change. Something non-existent, or just one button and you can do everything on the phone. And we work in a very similar way. A lot of people ask, did you do a customer survey to understand that mulmul sarees, soft and hugging your body like a second skin, is what people wanted? I say if Steve Jobs asked people whether they needed a phone with one button, no. People would not know that they wanted things. We make something and give them and say this is what you wanted. They say, oh yes, we wanted this. Nobody knows what they want. And that is okay. Sometimes.

‍