Love for Sarees Inspire Sisters to Make 50 Crore Brand and Empower 16,000 Weavers
With no background in the textile and apparel world, the sisters, Sujata and Taniya Biswas left their comfortable corporate jobs and started Suta, a saree brand.
It was 1 April 2016 when Sujata and Taniya Biswas left their comfortable corporate jobs out of their pure love for sarees. They left to make the brand ‘Suta’ (Meaning ‘thread’) which makes sarees and works with around 16,000 weavers and artisans, empowering them. What began as a passion project has in nearly six years turned into a business that has generated about Rs 50 crore in revenue and created a ‘happy place’ for over 150 full-time employees.
Suta is largely known for its range of cotton sarees from different traditions, but they also work with the purest mulberry silk, handloom ikats and linen, etc. On silk and cotton, they employ techniques like block printing, hand batik, embroidery, etc.
“After earning my engineering degree and MBA, I worked in the branding and steel industry, following which I applied for a PhD at IIT-Bombay to study e-commerce businesses. It was around this time when Taniya and I began thinking about starting our venture,” recalls Sujata in an interview with The Better India. Taniya too joined her sister in Mumbai, in 2013. She was working for IBM as a consultant after her MBA from IIM-Lucknow.
Even though these sisters loved their job they were not impacting lives as they wanted. After a year they began working on building their saree venture while also keeping their day job. The next two years went into the struggle of building a company from scratch. They hunted for fabric and skilled weavers across different corners of India.
Their venture started with Mulmul sarees, a fine, lightweight and soft cotton muslin. Before quitting their jobs the sisters, themselves packed and shipped these sarees, after that they employed one employee. What started with a bunch of weavers grew into thousands as the news spread giving Sujata and Taniya regular work throughout the year, that too above market rates. They were able to attract young customers from around India, particularly between the age of 18 and 25.
Today Suta is very successful despite the pandemic situation. Suta uses the stories of the creation of each saree to market it and this has proven to be very effective.
-Staff Reporter
