GETTY IMAGESApril, Cath-
t in a breezy
liam to play
th local chil-
dren and cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and Dilip Veng-
sarkar. The paparazzi went ballistic as the duchess batted
and bowled in a delightfully whimsical dress made by Anita
Dongre, the only Indian designer she wore on her visit to the
region. Within hours Dongre received panic calls from her
IT staff—the website had crashed as hundreds of people
from across the world logged on to buy it.
“Emails and phone calls poured in from as far as Brazil
and Australia, with most buyers calling from the US and the
UK,” said Dongre. Not bad for a designer who started out
with two machines in the balcony of her home and a 300sqft
store in Mumbai. Today, she
has 475 stores across the
country with a workforce of
2,500 employees, and hers
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the country to get private eq-
uity funding—from leading
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Dongre is clearly a woman
with a passion for design.
The moniker ‘Queen of
Prêt’ is apt for Dongre, who
owns three successful high-
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high-end Anita Dongre Brid-
al. By sheer size alone, she is
India’s fastest growing de-
signer. “Eighteen years ago I
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I simply addressed the needs
of countless Indian women
who were going to work for
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easy Western wear. That re-
ally paid off,” she told a
packed audience earlier thisyear at Harvard Business School’s India conference.
In an industry known for its big egos but not necessarily
big balance sheets, Dongre is somewhat of an anomaly. To
dig deeper into what makes her journey so unique, I drove
to Navi Mumbai, where straddling the hills of Rabale lies
her kingdom, a factory and studio spanning 90,000sqft.
Over a lunch of simple Indian food and crispy poppadum,
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year, he said, ‘Why so many brands? Shut all down, just
work with one.’ But I said, ‘How can I? They are my four
children! Which one do I shut down?’” So what she did in-
stead was hire the right CEOs to manage each brand, with
her taking on the leadership role in design. Excerpts from
the interview:What sets you apart? What is your
design philosophy?
Design works within the basic premise that it has to make
the wearer happy. Clothes are such an important part of our
lives. When you wear the right clothes, it’s an immediate
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in the airport by a total stranger who says, “I wore your
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play a big role in people’s journeys.You are a huge commercial success.
But does the ‘commercial designer’ moniker
compromise on creativity?
If I wanted fashion to not be worn and go straight to a mu-
seum, I’d express myself through painting. I know creativ-
ity comes in many forms but for me design has to have in-
telligence and it must serve
its core purpose—wearabili-
ty. The minute I create a de-
sign, I put it on someone. I
don’t see it on a dummy or
mannequin. A human being
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question to that person is al-
ways the same—“How do
you feel?’—because for me
that grabs the essence of de-
sign. So whenever girls inter-
view for a job, I say, “A job
requirement is that you have
to be ready to change clothes
20 times a day!”You took fashion, which
is always seen as elitist,
to ordinary girls not just
in big cities but also
small towns. Was that
challenging?
Why shouldn’t every woman
have the right to look fantas-
tic? Why do you have to spend
a million bucks to do so?GRASSROOT BY ANITA DONGRE178