Founder, Ritu Kumar | Founded 1969 | Kolkata
In the late 1960s, a young woman studying museology near Calcutta went on a college trip to a village along the Hooghly. What she found there was a community of hand-block printers with almost no work. Their craft was centuries old. Their designs had travelled to England, been copied in the mills of Lancashire, and come back to India as cheap machine-made cloth. The printers who had made the originals were left with nothing to print.
The student was Ritu Kumar. She started giving them designs. Half a century later, the label that grew out of those first blocks is one of the best-known names in Indian fashion, with more than a hundred stores and a majority shareholder in Reliance Retail. This is how it happened.
A Designer “Rather by Accident”
Ritu Kumar has never described herself as someone who always meant to be a fashion designer. She told the Khaleej Times in 2016 that she became one “rather by accident”. She had studied art history, partly in America, and the experience left her with an uncomfortable realisation: she knew very little about the art of her own country.
After returning to India she married, and then enrolled in a course in museology. It was the kind of training that teaches you to look closely at objects: how they were made, by whom, and why they survived or did not. That habit of looking would shape everything she built.
According to the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, which featured her archive in a 2023 exhibition, she also spent time as a journalist, covering the Paris fashion shows for The Times of India. What she saw there underlined how little institutional support fashion had at home.
The Village of Silent Blocks
The turning point was Serampore, a small textile town in West Bengal that had once been an important stop on the trade routes along the river. “I was introduced to the world of handicrafts and textiles in this country through block printing,” she said in the 2023 NMACC interview.
The printers she met there, she explained, “specialised in hand-block printing with a repertoire of Indian designs that were already appropriated by England.” To ELLE India in 2025 she put it more bluntly: “These designs were being replicated abroad, and the Indian craftsmen were left destitute.” Her response was simple. “It became important to bring it back home.”
She described the village to the Khaleej Times in words that still capture the mood of that moment: “I found it impoverished, but so very promising. And my story started there.”
Four Printers and Two Tables
The business began with almost nothing. ELLE India reported that she started with two tables and four hand-block printers. She drew patterns, the printers carved and printed them, and the first products were hand-block printed saris.
There is some disagreement in the record about where and when the first shop opened. ELLE India reported that her first boutique opened in Kolkata in 1969, and the company itself dates the brand to that year. Outlook reported in 2022 that she started in 1966 with a shop called Ritu’s Boutique in Delhi’s Defence Colony. What is not disputed is that the late 1960s were when the work began, and that it began with the printers.
According to NMACC, her first saris made with the Serampore craftsmen sold out at a grocery store in Kolkata. Not a boutique, not a department store: a grocery. India simply did not have the retail infrastructure for designer clothing. There were barely any fashion shows, and as she told the Khaleej Times, “there was a vacuum all over.”
Disappointment in Calcutta
Not everything worked. Outlook reported that an early-1970s show of her hand-block printed saris in Calcutta did poorly. The city’s elite were wearing floral chiffons and pearls, and printed cotton from a village workshop did not fit their idea of glamour. “I was very disappointed,” she told the magazine. “I had put in a lot of hard work and research.”
She kept going. In the same period she found Ranihati, an artisan settlement just outside Calcutta where craftsmen still knew zardozi, the metallic embroidery that had flourished under the Mughals. Outlook reported that she began working to revive it. Over the years her work extended to phulkari, amli, kalabattun, chikankari and folk embroidery, almost always done directly with artisans, often in remote villages.
She saw herself as part of a wider revivalist movement of the 1970s, telling Outlook that she was “indebted to other revivalists of the time like Pupul Jayakar and Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay.”
The Order She Could Not Fill
Growth came from an unexpected direction. Orders began arriving from abroad as well as from within India. She told the Khaleej Times about one in particular: an Australian trade group wanted 500 scarves. Her workshop was far too small. “I said I couldn’t make that in a year – we had such a small team,” she recalled.
Her husband, a businessman, joined the venture to handle the commercial side. She concentrated on design, and exports began. “So I would do the designing, and export started,” she said. “One thing simply led to another.”
By the 1970s the brand was retailing in both Europe and India, according to the company’s own history. It made Ritu Kumar one of the first Indian designers with an international following.
Pageants, a Princess and a Book
Through the 1990s, Ritu Kumar became the designer who dressed Miss India. For nearly 20 years, ELLE India reported, she designed the wardrobes of the winners who represented the country at international pageants. Outlook named Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai and Lara Dutta among them. She used the platform, NMACC noted, to put Indian crafts in front of a global audience.
Her clients came to include Diana, Princess of Wales. ELLE India reported that Diana wore a blue salwar kameez designed by Ritu Kumar during a 1997 visit to Pakistan. Her work has appeared in the windows of Bergdorf Goodman and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York.
The museologist never went away. In October 1999 Christie’s in London published her book, Costumes and Textiles of Royal India, a 344-page history running from ancient India through the Mughal period and British rule. Reviewing it for Times Higher Education that year, Andrew Robinson wrote that it deserved to become a standard work of reference.
Recognition followed. She received the Indira Gandhi Priyadarshini Award in 2007 and the Padma Shri in 2013, according to ELLE India.
The Next Generation, and New Capital
In 2002 the business launched a ready-to-wear line, Label Ritu Kumar, aimed at younger and working women, Outlook reported. Her son Amrish Kumar joined the brand in the 2000s and, as managing director, led its move from a single designer house to a multi-brand business. She has been generous about his role. “Frankly, I don’t think I would have taken the brand where he has today,” she told ELLE India.
Expansion needed money. FashionNetwork reported that the company raised ₹100 crore from private equity firm Everstone in 2014. By July 2019 it had around 90 stores across its brands, 30 of them Label stores, and was looking for more. “We are in the market this year looking for another injection, a larger injection than last time,” Amrish Kumar said at the time.
Where the Story Stands
That injection came from Reliance. In October 2021 Reliance Retail Ventures acquired a 52% stake in Ritika Pvt Ltd, the company behind the Ritu Kumar brands, buying out Everstone’s 35% in the process, Outlook and the Deccan Herald reported. The price was not disclosed. At the time the business had four fashion brand portfolios selling through 151 points of sale globally. Isha Ambani said Reliance was “delighted to partner with Ritu Kumar, who possesses strong brand recognition, the potential for scale.”
Ritu Kumar framed the deal around the same people she had started with. “India’s entire fashion industry rests on the back of the craftspeople of India,” she told The Business of Fashion.
In 2022 Business Today reported plans to open 45 to 50 more stores, across a family that now includes Ritu Kumar, Label, Ri, aarké and Ritu Kumar Home. By August 2025, ELLE India reported, the house had more than 100 stores spanning couture, prêt, accessories and homeware.
It all goes back to a silent village workshop, four printers and two tables, and a student who noticed that the designs being sold back to India had been India’s to begin with.
Founder Journeys is a Sakhi Sangini series telling the stories of women who built businesses in India. This story is based on public interviews and reporting.
Sources: Khaleej Times (October 2016); NMACC (May 2023); ELLE India (August 2025); Outlook (February 2022); Outlook (October 2021); Deccan Herald (October 2021); The Business of Fashion (October 2021); FashionNetwork (July 2019); Business Today (September 2022); Times Higher Education (November 1999); ritukumar.com company history
