Founder, Rubans Accessories | Founded 2014 | Bengaluru
A fight, ₹300 and a railway platform
In 1997, after an argument with her father, a 15-year-old girl walked out of a one-bedroom flat in Nala Sopara, on the northern edge of Mumbai. Chinu Kala took a bag of clothes and ₹300. Her father was a doctor with a private practice, The Weekend Leader reported, and her mother was a nurse working in Saudi Arabia. Chinu was the youngest of three children, an average student at St Aloysius School who loved to dance. She never finished Class 10.
She spent her first nights at a railway station. Business Insider reported two nights at Mumbai Central. She bought a vada pav for ₹3 and worked out how long the rest of the money would last. “I sat in a corner and cried a lot,” she told The Weekend Leader.
It took two or three days to find a dormitory, The Better India reported, where a mattress cost ₹20 a night. Later she shared a dormitory with 25 other women. She had no qualifications and no contacts, and she was too young to be taken seriously for most jobs.
A hundred doors a day
The work she found paid only on commission: selling knife sets, coasters and small household products door to door. On her first day, she told Business Insider, “For three hours I stood under the building and cried — but accepting defeat and going back home wasn’t an option.” She sold three pieces that day and made ₹60.
The days that followed were mostly worse. “I would knock on over a 100 doors every day,” she told Entrepreneur India, and about two per cent of those knocks ended in a sale. A typical day earned her around ₹20. “There were days when I would survive on vada pao or just a milk packet, having one meal a day,” she said.
She has described the rejection as the thing that hardened her. “Every door that was shut on my face and every rejection I faced I became almost shock-proof,” she told The Better India. About a year in, aged 16, she was made a supervisor and trained three other girls to sell. It was her first lesson in teaching a sales routine as well as running one.
Learning to sell, then learning to stay
The next few years were a string of jobs, each paying a little more than the last. From 2000 she worked in an apparel store in Ghatkopar, earning about ₹5,000 a month, mostly from commission. For about six months she also waited tables in the evenings, from 6 pm to 11 pm. Within three years, The Better India reported, she had become financially stable.
She then worked as a telemarketing executive. The Weekend Leader and the Free Press Journal place this job at Tata Communications; Business Insider describes it as customer care at a Tata Indicom franchisee. There she met Amit Kala, an MBA graduate, and they married in 2004. Amit later became a director at Rubans and today is described as its co-founder. Chinu has called him her biggest support.
A pageant and a lesson in finishing touches
In 2006 the couple moved to Goa, where Chinu took a make-up artist’s course. At about the same time, friends pushed her to enter the Gladrags Mrs India pageant. Accounts differ on the year (2006, 2007 or 2008) and on how far she got, but every account has her in the finals. She modelled for a while afterwards, though she told YourStory it “was not really her calling.”
The pageant left her with a business idea. Watching the other contestants, she told the Free Press Journal, she saw that “it was only the right accessory that completed their look.” She also noticed that India had very few jewellery brands. “When I started off the company, there were no brands for jewellery in India,” she told Entrepreneur India.
Before that, she built a different business. In 2008, now in Bengaluru, she started Fonte Corporate Solutions, a corporate merchandising firm. YourStory and Entrepreneur India list clients including Sony, Airtel, ESPN, Oracle, ITC and the IPL. The Weekend Leader reported that it earned her ₹5–7 lakh a year. Meeting brand managers who cared deeply about their brands, the Free Press Journal reported, made her want one of her own.
A few square feet of mall and ₹3 lakh
In 2014 she put ₹3 lakh of savings into Rubans, a fashion jewellery label. The name is French for “ribbons”. It started at Phoenix Marketcity in Whitefield, Bengaluru, in a space so small that reports don’t agree on its size. The Weekend Leader says 36 sq ft, YourStory says 64, SMBStory says 70, and The Better India describes it as six feet by six. It took six months to get the space. She told YourStory she couldn’t afford the security deposit and was given a month to pay it, and the first month’s sales covered it.
“I was the only person at the kiosk and handled all the customers myself,” she told The Weekend Leader. The pieces ranged from ₹229 to about ₹10,000, mixing ethnic and western styles. They were made by artisans in Jaipur, Rajkot, Ahmedabad and Kolkata.
Bigger malls were harder to get into. The Forum Mall in Koramangala turned her down at first. She kept following up for months until the management gave her a spot in the central atrium. Once again she couldn’t pay the deposit, and SMBStory reported that she sold ₹15 lakh of jewellery in 15 days to raise it. Stores in Hyderabad and Kochi followed, five in all at the peak.
The first year brought in about ₹20 lakh, YourStory reported, and the business was profitable from the start. Then the landlord of Rubans’ office defaulted on his bank EMIs and the team was evicted. They found a new office within 24 hours. “These initial years toughened me up and taught me that nothing comes easy in life,” she told YourStory in 2018.
Shutting the shops, opening the screen
Around 2017 Rubans began selling online. By 2019, SMBStory reported, about 60 per cent of its store customers were buying online, so Chinu started closing physical stores and moved sales to Myntra, Flipkart, Jabong and the brand’s own website. Myntra selected Rubans for its accelerator programme. The Covid lockdowns finished the job. The Weekend Leader reported that she closed the remaining stores, and the Free Press Journal said the pandemic gave online sales a further push.
The numbers rose quickly. Sales were about ₹56 lakh in 2016-17, according to The Better India and SMBStory. SMBStory put FY19 at ₹7.5 crore. Business Insider reported ₹29.7 crore in FY21 and ₹51 crore in FY22. The founders say Rubans was Myntra’s highest-selling brand for three years running. New collections came out every few weeks instead of every season. Her motto, as she told SMBStory, was “When you cannot outplay anyone, outwork them.”
A ₹100 crore valuation and a new owner
In early 2023 Chinu and Amit appeared on the second season of Shark Tank India. They reported about ₹200 crore in lifetime sales and asked for investment to help the brand grow. Namita Thapar, Vineeta Singh and Aman Gupta offered ₹1 crore for 1 per cent equity, which valued Rubans at ₹100 crore, plus a ₹50 lakh loan at 12 per cent. Anupam Mittal offered the same valuation with no debt, but the couple chose the three-shark deal. “Debt is cheaper than equity — at any stage,” Thapar said on the show, Business Insider reported. “The investment and guidance we received from Aman, Namita, and Vineeta will help us take Rubans global,” Chinu told Indian Retailer.
Some reports turned that valuation into headlines about a “₹104 crore company”. It was a valuation agreed on television, not audited revenue. Indian Startup Times found no audited revenue figures for FY24 or FY25.
The biggest change came in August 2025. Ananta Capital, an investor in consumer brands, bought a majority stake in Fonte Fashions India Private Limited, the company that owns Rubans. PTI and Bar & Bench reported the deal, but neither disclosed the price or the stake size. The announcement listed Chinu as founder and Amit as co-founder, and Ananta said it would work with both of them on the brand’s next stage. “Rubans is not just a brand — it’s a dream I’ve built brick by brick,” Chinu said in the release. Some reports, including that release, date the founding to 2017. That is probably when the company was incorporated, while the brand itself began in 2014.
Rubans now runs from a 4,000 sq ft office and an 8,000 sq ft warehouse in Bengaluru, with about 70 staff, The Weekend Leader reported. Chinu lives near the mall where she once ran a one-person kiosk. “I still work for 15 hours or even more everyday,” she said.
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: Entrepreneur India (Mar 2022); The Weekend Leader (Mar 2022); The Better India (Aug 2019); YourStory (Jun 2018) and SMBStory (Jul 2019); Free Press Journal (Nov 2022); Business Insider India (Mar 2023); Indian Retailer (Apr 2023); PTI via The Week (Aug 2025); Bar & Bench (Sep 2025); Indian Startup Times (Oct 2026).
Cover photo: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
