This start-up founder battled sexism and armed extortionists

Tech in Asia traces how Nidhi Agarwal founded and established Kaaryah, a niche estore for women's formal western wear

Nidhi Agarwal was a strategy director with American conglomerate Honeywell when she chanced upon the idea of Kaaryah.

She was waiting at Delhi airport for a flight to Bengaluru and had a few hours to kill. She wandered into a coffee shop and settled down on a couch with a mug of cappuccino. The place was crowded, with a lot of people rushing about, and someone brushed against her, spilling coffee on her shirt. Nidhi’s trip to Bengaluru was for an important meeting. She didn’t want to look sloppy with a stained shirt. So she headed to a mall just outside the airport to shop for a sharp shirt.

“I ended up going to a bunch of stores just to find a shirt that fit well and looked smart. But I didn’t find anything that I really liked. Even with expensive brands, the clothes were either too tight at the bust or too loose at the waist,” she recalls. That experience got her thinking. “I used to shop for workwear when I travelled abroad. But what about others?”
 

Nidhi is an expert at market research and analysis. It didn’t take her long to spot the opportunity to build a pathbreaking apparel brand in India. 
 

After a year and a half of market and product-related research, Kaaryah launched in September 2013. Nidhi pegs the market in India for women’s western formal wear at $1.5 -2 billion. “The market is poised to grow twice that in the next three to four years,” she says.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.