Why India Doesn't Celebrate Its Doctors | Abhijeet Kaji, Knya

Nobody in India celebrates doctors. So they built a brand that does.

Knya was founded in 2021 by Vanshika and Abhijeet Kaji. She is a fourth-generation textile entrepreneur and Forbes 30 Under 30. He left a private equity job at Stanford to join her. 85% of revenue is B2C, which Ragini describes as unheard of for a medical brand.

The idea for Knya came from a simple observation. Doctors and nurses in India work 12 to 16 hours a day in scrubs that were functional at best and demeaning at worst. There was no brand thinking about how they felt in what they wore. And yet, if you looked at the culture around them, cricketers had Nike, actors had Gucci, and doctors had a shapeless cotton uniform that came from whichever hospital wanted the cheapest option.

Vanshika and Abhijeet decided they wanted to be to doctors what Nike is to athletes. That is a bigger ambition than it sounds, because it is not just about the product. It is about whether a profession feels celebrated or forgotten.

Vanshika started it. Abhijeet joined the rocket ship.

Vanshika is the creative half of the founding pair, a fourth-generation textile entrepreneur who leads product development, brand and communication. Abhijeet describes her as the real deal. He was doing a private equity job after his MBA at Stanford when she asked him to build this together. His words: she was kind enough to give him a seat on the journey.

The split is clean. She leads everything creative: design, product, fabric technology and brand. He leads hiring, revenue and growth. It is a husband-wife founding team with complementary strengths rather than a divided one, and Abhijeet is unusually direct about who had the original vision and who came in after.

Seven to thirty-five stores in a year

Knya had seven stores at this point last year. At the time of recording it had thirty-five, targeting sixty by year end and a hundred by 2027, all company-operated. The principle behind the pace is deliberate: start slow, let things break, learn what actually happens when you put people inside a store. The store staff are the product. Then accelerate.

Every store you open, a copycat opens next door

The category is largely unbranded, and when Knya opens a store a competitor frequently opens next to it within weeks. Abhijeet frames this not as a crisis but as a signal: if nobody was copying, the category would not matter. His answer is to stay on the path that is working. Proprietary fabric technology, manufacturing across ten factories in Maharashtra, and a customer base of over two lakh medical professionals create advantages a copycat cannot buy in a single season.

85% of revenue comes from people, not institutions

Medical apparel has historically been a B2B category: hospitals buy in bulk and the person wearing it has no say. Knya flipped that. 85% of revenue comes from individual medical professionals buying for themselves, which means the doctor or nurse chose it. That changes everything about brand, retention, and what a product has to do on an Instagram reel at eleven at night.

They put Kota Factory actors in scrubs and never tracked a sale

Knya worked with TVF, the production house behind Kota Factory and Aspirants, on a micro-drama collaboration featuring their actors in Knya scrubs. The episode ran to millions of organic views and contributed to a record month for the brand.

Abhijeet is explicit: they did not track the sales attribution. The intent was not conversion, it was cultural relevance. Before commissioning it, they ran a survey on their own website, asking 30 to 40 lakh monthly visitors whether they knew Kota Factory and the creators involved. Overwhelmingly yes. The validation was done before the spend, not after.

Content is a capital allocation decision

Knya has six lakh subscribers on YouTube and treats content as a budget line rather than a free channel. Abhijeet frames it the way an investor frames a portfolio: how do you allocate finite resources to get maximum content across different formats and platforms.

What they do not do is sell in the content. No discount codes, no five-pocket tutorials, no urgency plays. The channel is educational, informative and entertaining, and the audience is medical professionals, 70% of whom are under 40. When a creator does a paid collaboration, the check is whether they were posting about Knya 20 days before and are still doing so 20 days after. If yes, the collaboration is genuine. If not, it was rented.

The number one reason companies fail is co-founders

A Stanford professor asked a room of MBA students why companies fail. Everyone guessed product, funding, team size. The answer: co-founder misalignment. Vanshika managed Knya through a difficult pregnancy, bedbound for eight months, running the company from a hospital. He commuted between the hospital and the office. Their view is that when complementary skills and genuine trust coexist, a husband-wife founding team is not a risk. The guilt of parenting and the pressure of founding sit alongside each other rather than cancelling each other out.

If you meet a doctor, say thank you

Asked to name one word Knya should leave in a medical professional’s mind, Abhijeet lands on trust, respect and dignity without choosing between them. He describes medicine as a lonely job, where disrespect comes from patients, colleagues, seniors and administrators in roughly equal measure.

The closing thought is not a business one. If you encounter a medical professional, say thank you. Be kind. They work in conditions most people do not see, for hours most people do not keep, and the category they represent has gone undercelebrated in Indian culture for long enough.

Listen to the full conversation with Abhijeet Kaji on FyndOutWithRagini.