Co-founder and Creative Director, Joker & Witch | Founded 2015 | Bengaluru
Islands, Delhi and a box of scraps
Maya Varma’s family is from Kerala, but she spent her early childhood in the Maldives. She has described weekends on the islands spent swimming and kayaking with her brother and friends, and summer holidays that meant long train journeys back to her grandparents in Kerala. The rest of her childhood was in Delhi.
She was a strong student, and she drew, painted and danced. She also made things. On the Teejh brand blog she recalls making jewellery out of scrap materials and handbags out of cardboard as a child. Her family assumed the good marks pointed somewhere else. “I was good at studies so everyone thought I would end up becoming an engineer or a doctor,” she said. According to StartupTalky, her father wanted her to be a doctor.
She was sure she wanted neither. She took a place at the National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT) in Delhi to study fashion and lifestyle accessory design.
Learning the trade, one employer at a time
After NIFT, Varma started as an accessory designer under the Delhi couturier Rajesh Pratap Singh. She then moved south to Pondicherry, working with the leather goods house Hidesign and later with Holii, YourStory reported. StartupTalky notes that Hidesign was where she first saw how retail is actually run, beyond the drawing board.
In 2013 she moved to Bengaluru to join Styletag.com, a young fashion e-commerce startup. That job brought two things she would build on: a view of how online fashion selling worked from the inside, and a colleague named Satish Singh.
Singh had studied marketing at MICA in Ahmedabad and had worked in fashion e-commerce since 2010, when he joined fashionandyou.com. He had, by the company’s account, long wanted a watch brand of his own. Varma brought product design and merchandising. He brought numbers, marketing and operations.
A tattoo and a nickname
The two married, and by early 2015 they had left their well-paying jobs within months of each other. StartupTalky reports that they started in January 2015 with ₹2 lakh of their own money, working out of their two-bedroom flat in Bengaluru. “Entrepreneurship happened by chance, honestly,” Varma told the site.
The name came from home. Singh had a Joker tattoo, and the couple joked that he was the Joker and she was the Witch. In YourStory’s account they “jokingly started calling each other Joker & Witch based on our individual alter egos.” When it came to naming the business, they used it. “Once you know the brand, you’ll never forget the name,” Varma told StartupTalky.
The idea behind the business was a gap they could both see. Indian watch counters were dominated by legacy brands. Nobody was making affordable, trend-led watches and jewellery for younger shoppers who followed global fashion online. Their prices would stay low: YourStory put watches at roughly ₹500 to ₹1,500, with accessories under ₹3,000.
When the first channel closed
Their first sales channel was Fashionara, an Indian fashion marketplace, on a consignment model. Then Fashionara shut down after failing to raise its next round. StartupTalky reports that about ₹11 lakh of stock and pending payments were stuck when it closed, more than five times what the couple had started with.
They responded by spreading out. They listed on 10 to 12 marketplaces and did everything themselves: photography, listings, packing and dispatch. Indian Retailer described the founders packing and shipping hundreds of orders from the flat, often late at night. “There was one night we packed 100 orders,” Varma told StartupTalky.
Marketplace selling brought its own trouble. In YourStory’s account, payment delays and non-payment from some channels created a cash crunch. Cross-border manufacturing and imports ran late, and finding the right accounting partners took time. Even so, Varma said the brand was profitable from its first month of sales, and that it had more than 5,000 customers by its third month.
Fewer categories, their own shop window
The early range was wide: watches, jewellery, handbags, footwear and sunglasses. By 2016 they had cut it to two, watches and jewellery, StartupTalky reports.
In April 2016 they launched their own website on Shopify, built without an agency. The first order came on day one. Over time the website became the main channel. In a January 2022 interview with Indian Retailer, Varma described Joker & Witch as “an online first D2C brand with about 60 percent of sales coming from our own website,” with Myntra, Amazon, Nykaa and Ajio making up the rest. Her description of the marketing approach was short: “We follow the 3 ‘I’ rule: Instagram, Innovation, and Influencers.”
In 2018 the founders took a loan to manufacture their own watches, StartupTalky reports, moving away from white-label sourcing. The division of work stayed clear. Varma ran design, merchandising, creative, hiring, social media and organic marketing. Singh ran the P&L, finance, paid marketing, operations, manufacturing and customer relations.
By November 2021, Varma told YourStory the brand had sold “almost three lakh units in the last 12 months.” She said it had grown more than 200% year on year for three financial years. She added that its best single month for profit, August 2021, had beaten its combined revenue for FY16 and FY17.
A second brand, and the question of investors
Varma also noticed what customers kept asking for: subtle, wearable ethnic jewellery. In November 2019 the couple launched Teejh, an oxidised silver jewellery brand. YourStory reported that Teejh went from idea to launch in about two months, and its website went live in under a week. It later added understated sarees. On the Teejh blog, Varma describes pieces handcrafted in brass and metal by artisans across India. She says the brand is for women who “want to hold their history close to their heart.”
For years the founders said no to investors. In late 2021 they told YourStory they were in talks to raise money, and Indian Retailer reported in January 2022 that they planned a raise that year. What happened in 2022 was different. GlobalBees, the brand-acquisition company backed by FirstCry’s parent, took a stake in JW Brands Private Limited, the company that owns Joker & Witch, Teejh and a third label, Bewitched. Local Samosa reports an estimated ₹3.78 crore for the first stake and a further ₹20.5 crore in 2024, which took GlobalBees to 75.10%.
Looking back, the founders told Local Samosa: “We probably could have grown faster with external capital.”
Where Joker & Witch stands now
On 30 October 2026, GlobalBees bought a further 14.23% of JW Brands from other shareholders for ₹18.68 crore in cash. That took its holding to 89.33%. The filing put the company’s turnover at ₹57.68 crore in FY24, ₹97.32 crore in FY25 and ₹105.53 crore in FY26. StartupTalky, in an April 2026 interview with Varma, reported that Joker & Witch was on track to close the year at around ₹120 crore. The same piece reported a team of about 150 people and two offline stores.
Varma remains co-founder and creative director, leading brand and product across Joker & Witch and Teejh. The company’s own site counts more than 5,000 styles and over a million customers. From a ₹2 lakh start in a two-bedroom flat, the business that took its name from a tattoo and a household joke now reports more than ₹100 crore in annual turnover.
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.
Cover photo: supplied to Sakhi Sangini.
Sources: StartupTalky (April 2026); YourStory HerStory (November 2021); Indian Retailer (January 2022); Local Samosa (September 2026); Teejh blog (April 2021); Joker & Witch, About Us; Entrepreneur India speaker profile; Globalbees/Brainbees stake disclosure, reported by Multibagg (October 2026).
