After decades of courting wedding goers and fashion seekers, homegrown luxury ethnic wear brands such as Manish Malhotra and House of Masaba are now also wooing large investments. How has corporatisation of the largely unorganised market changed the industry—and is global domination the ultimate goal?
In 2009, Masaba Gupta started her fashion label, House of Masaba, then a boutique brand that opened to fanfare for its signature prints and contemporary take on Indian wear. In 2015, however, it seemed like ‘nothing was clicking’.
“We had a very low period—we would do show after show at Fashion Week, but nothing was really sitting with the audience. I was disciplined about doing both seasons, in Mumbai and in Delhi, and I guess a bit of fatigue had set in with the brand. I wasn’t reinventing myself in that cycle, and I soon realised that we needed a business head to step in to let me focus on my creativity,” Gupta recalls. “That’s when a shift for the brand and its vision took place.”
Once a business head was on board, Gupta’s “mom and pop-run boutique brand” took cognisance of its full potential. A conversation about raising money began, as her vision from Day 1 was to have a strong retail footprint. In 2018, Gupta raised a first round of funds of $1 million (₹7 crore), led by Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal.
“It was a pure financial investment, not a strategic one, but I had a lot of people guiding me about what this would eventually become. We had made the decision that, at some point, we would sell a majority stake to a larger conglomerate,” Gupta says.
In January 2022, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd (ABFRL) announced that it would pick up 51 percent stake in House of Masaba Lifestyle Pvt Ltd, for ₹90 crore.
(This story appears in the 17 November, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)