WHEN ADITI CHAND and Udit Khanna got married in 2012, neither of them was interested in Udit’s 200-year-old family business of textiles.

While Aditi was heading M&As for the infrastructure vertical at Edelweiss Capital, Udit was running a recruitment and education consulting company in London. A chance conversation with an elderly weaver in Varanasi proved to be the turning point in their careers, and turned them into founders of Tilfi — a luxury brand celebrating the 12th century Banarasi craft.

“He (the weaver) told us there was no future in the craft and that his children didn’t want to take it forward. When we advised him to motivate them, the elderly weaver looked at Udit and told him — ‘you are asking me to encourage my children, but you yourself have settled in London’. There was no arguing after that. We decided to come back,” remembers Aditi. They registered Tilfi in 2013, and eventually launched the brand in 2016.

When the duo registered the brand, the decline of handlooms was at its peak. Though the iconic Banarasi, known for its intricate weaving styles such as rangkat, jamavar, tanchoi, and kadhua still enthralled the average Indian, weaving one took months and was prohibitively expensive. This led to the advent of cheap power-loom replicas. A gorgeous zari-laden sari, which took a weaver 60-100 days to weave and commanded a price in lakhs, got replicated by the power-loom and was sold for a few thousands.

“We understood how the craft can be presented in its finest form. We chose to be in the luxury segment since we realised it’s the only way the craft can be presented. Anything lower, it will get replicated. What we create today is hard to replicate. The mastery involved is very high,” says Udit. The average order value at Tilfi is upwards of ₹50,000.

The idea was to be at the highest spectrum of the craft so that machines find it difficult to compete. Even globally, icons like Coco Chanel, Christian Dior or Thierry Hermès have created valuable luxury brands by promoting age-old crafts. And that’s what played in the mind of Palak Shah, founder, Ekaya Banaras, when she took charge of her father’s retail venture in 2012.

“If an LV or a Hermès can launch a luxury brand using the craftmanship of their country, why can’t we, is the question I asked myself. My saris take longer to be woven than a Birkin bag. It’s just that they love their brands, which is why they are able to grow.” Shah’s family moved to Varanasi from Patan, Gujarat, over a century ago and have been wholesalers of Banarasi saris ever since.

Only 5% of Varanasi’s ₹200-300 crore textile industry are handloom artisans. The next generation of wholesaler and manufacturer families of the city wants to give the craft its due by building luxury brands that resonate with global audiences.

With five stores around the country, Palak’s Ekaya Banaras is already a ₹90-crore brand. Tilfi, on the other hand, prefers the digital- and craft-first route. With just two stores (in Varanasi and Mumbai) the plan is to grow slowly and mindfully. But much before Ekaya or Tilfi came into the picture, the first Banarasi brand out of Varanasi was Umang Agrawal’s HolyWeaves, which first came into being in 2010 as a Facebook page.

A financial analyst with S&P Global Ratings, Umang shuttled between Mumbai and Washington, before finally joining his family business. “Though I enjoyed my job, it was coming at an opportunity cost. I felt I could bring value into textiles in terms of design. I wanted to do existing things in a new way.”

OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLE

If you walk into the 5,200 sq. ft Tilfi store in Mumbai (housed in a heritage building from the 20th century in Ballard Estate) the first thing that would catch your attention is Varanasi’s age-old gaddi tradition of selling saris. There is, of course, a mannequin draped in a vibrant red bridal Banarasi sari, but there is also a mannequin in a rather unconventional pastel-pink lehenga inspired by French Rococo. As you surf through the store, you are bound to stumble upon western work-wear (jackets, trousers, and skirts, and even saris). They are in vibrant blues and blacks with geometric patterns and not a trace of zari. “It’s twill,” says Aditi. “We wouldn’t necessarily make something which is contemporary because you have got a very striking fashion statement. We will rather use a completely new technique. It requires a lot of technical adjustment to get weavers to do twill with silk. Similarly, we have introduced pashmina. To introduce pashmina yarn with Banarasi silk is incredibly hard.”

Innovation is the name of the game. The good old paisleys and bootas do signify the iconic Banarasi, but taking the craft to an all-new level required reimagining. “We were making the usual paisleys and florals, but there was scope to make plenty of new designs in a fresh palette of colours. We brought designs from cultures across the globe into brocade weaving — Indian and Buddhist scriptures, geometric motifs, animal stripes, Halloween motifs,” explains Umang of HolyWeaves.

Among the most sought after at his atelier in Varanasi are ‘dress shawls’, the perfect embellishment not just with a traditional sari, but also with an elegant western outfit. Almost 50% of the revenues of HolyWeaves comes from the Indian diaspora living abroad, and Umang believes it’s mainly due to products such as neck-ties, ascot ties and pocket squares, which appeal to global sensibilities.

For Palak of Ekaya Banaras, it’s all about making the sari the most stylish outfit. In fact, her entry-level collection, ‘Iro’, which comprises solid-coloured saris, is priced at ₹14,000. “My dream is to see a French girl walking in a sari, with brooches and sunglasses. I want global designers to copy my sari.”

Palak has added immense amount of styling — from being the first to introduce the concept of wearing a belt or a cape on a sari, to launching pre-draped saris and accessories such as brooches. The intent is to make the humble sari a fashion statement, especially among the Gen Z.

Aditi of Tilfi says their designs are not a drastic departure from the skills of Varanasi, but an evolution. “Our first step was to master the craft that artisans are good at. Once we were confident, we encouraged them to do new things with the same technique.” She talks about a popular Banarasi motif, Shikarga, which came to India through Persia and was inspired by hunting. Kings and queens wore the outfits, characterised by animal motifs, to symbolise their hunting prowess. “The challenge was to make it more interesting and appealing. We imagined the same lion, but with a gentle gaze. He is no longer being hunted, but captured in the canvas of a jungle, in its majestic glory,” explains Aditi.

THE ECOSYSTEM

One of the biggest challenges for these entrepreneurs has been to break out of the wholesale mindset that their respective families have been used to, for centuries. “I come from a 130-year-old sariwallah family, where brand thinking was a far-flung thought. From the first day, I decided to hire a marketing manager and nobody understood me. Nobody in the family knew how to measure marketing. Sales, business targets, everything was fluke. You walked into the store, saw yellow saris were selling well, and ordered 10-15 yellow saris,” points out Palak.

A lot of her time, she says, went into putting systems and processes in place. But the bigger challenge for all of them was to convince weavers to work on the designs given to them. There was too much scepticism. Wholesalers bought from weavers, and retailers bought from wholesalers. A weaver had to invest anywhere between ₹15,000 and ₹1 lakh for a sari and wouldn’t get paid for 60-90 days. Even worse, if the sari didn’t fetch buyers, the wholesaler/retailer returned the sari to the weaver, which led to idle inventory. Understandably, the weaver was sceptical to try out new designs.

“For us, it was all about keeping weavers engaged and paying them back. We had to fix a broken system. There was no incentive to innovate because one couldn’t command a premium,” says Tilfi’s Udit.

“I don’t want to run our looms with our weavers sweating, but unfortunately that’s how the industry had evolved. I want to reinvent the process. My ambition is that every single loom should run in an atmosphere where the process is as important as the product,” says Umang of HolyWeaves.

While both Ekaya Banaras and HolyWeaves work with over 10,000 weavers, Tilfi has been impacting lives of around 2,500.

DIGITAL FIRST

A digital-first strategy may sound out of sync for an established luxury brand — after all luxury is all about experiences and touch and feel — but it may not be such a bad idea if you are an upstart, building your narrative.

For Tilfi, the digital-first choice was to take the craft global and find an audience, says Udit. “The craft had appreciation in small pockets around the world. The idea was always to be craft-first. But then, how do you sell the highest level of craftsmanship when there aren’t enough takers in a single region?”

“E-commerce helps more people see your brand,” agrees Umang. One of the pre-requisites of luxury is scarcity. “If we list a sari online, we still make sure it’s a one-off. Yes, we do spend a lot of time and energy in making that available on our online store, but we are still selling one piece. It is important you make something so beautiful that people are willing to pay a premium. E-commerce has its own benefit for both the seller and the buyer,” he adds.

Around 50% of Tilfi’s and HolyWeaves’ revenues come from e-commerce. In fact, Umang is now looking at using AI to improve his online experience. The physical store in Varanasi is inspired by Raja Ravi Varma, and Umang is trying to recreate a similar experience online with the help of AI.

“We are trying to make our online store an extension of our atelier in Varanasi. The vertical stripes on our header is not just an aesthetic element, it is the reed of the handloom, the tool through which the waft passes. In the background, you can see small dots, the jacquard cards, and every eight seconds you will see them moving, just as you see in a handloom,” he explains.

The ambition of these entrepreneurs is to build global brands. While Palak’s vision is have a store at the famed Fifth Avenue in New York, the Tilfi founders intend to build the highest level of craftsmanship. “It may not be the wisest commercial decision as there is a way to scale faster in the market and we are conscious of that. But we believe we are building Tilfi for a really long time-frame,” says Aditi.

None of them are looking at selling out either. They are there for the long term, a crucial ingredient for building a luxury brand that will stand the test of time.