By seamlessly integrating creativity and commerce, Anita Dongre has become the Queen of Prêt in india. Her success lies in making luxury affordable for one and all, but it’s the marriage of fashion and ethics that makes her the torchbearer of our times.
On a hot summer day in April, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, stepped out in a breezy printed dress with her husband Prince William to play cricket at Mumbai’s famous Oval Maidan with local children and cricketers Sachin Tendulkar and Dilip Vengsarkar. 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 was the first fashion house in the country to get private equity funding from leading US firm General Atlantic. Dongre is clearly a woman with a passion for design.
The moniker ‘Queen of Prêt’ is apt for Dongre, who owns three successful highstreet labels AND, Global Desi, and Grassroot and the high-end Anita Dongre Bridal. By sheer size alone, she is India’s fastest growing designer. “Eighteen years ago I created my first brand, AND. I simply addressed the needs of countless Indian women who were going to work for the first time and wanted easy Western wear. That really paid off,” she told a packed audience earlier this year at Harvard Business School’s India conference.
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