How He Used Celebrity Marketing to Build a ₹100Cr Offline Business | Anuj Mundhra, Jaipur Kurti

There are about 25 fake Jaipur Kurti websites

Anuj Mundhra started on ₹1,400 a month at a saree showroom. He now runs a listed ethnic wear company, and his advice to founders is almost entirely about cash flow.

The counterfeit sites copy the name, the logo and the product photographs, take cash on delivery orders, and send something else. When the customer is disappointed, the complaint often arrives at the real company. Anuj has counted around 25 of them.

Founders sometimes treat this as a compliment. He doesn’t. A fake site isn’t stealing one sale, it is spending trust that took a decade to build, and it makes customers warier of the genuine brand. His answer is to point people at the official domain, which carries every retail store location and the company’s actual contact details, and to keep saying so publicly.

"Where people stop, that is where founders should start."

From a saree showroom to a listed company

Nandani Creation, the company behind Jaipur Kurti, was founded by Anuj and Vandana Mundhra. He came out of trading fabric and dress material around 2007 and 2008, and the manufacturing side began with two or three machines and outsourced capacity. At one point they were running around 50.

The company listed in 2016 rather than raising venture money, and Anuj is unusually positive about what that did to the business. Listing forced proper accounting, organised data and quarterly disclosure early. Being examined every three months, he argues, made the company more efficient rather than more timid.

Cash flow, then inventory, then analytics

Asked what founders should actually watch, he does not start with reach or revenue. He starts with cash, because in fashion your capital sits inside fabric, finished stock, marketplace settlements and returns. You can have demand and still not be able to fund the next production cycle. His view is that a business should be able to hold roughly six months of cash flow.

Second is inventory turnaround, and specifically taking ego out of it. Fashion changes; a print you personally love does not become correct because you backed it. The split he runs is roughly 20% core, 60% seasonal and 20% trend, with the trend portion refreshing every three months or so.

Third is analytics, and here he is precise about what it reveals. Two products can share the same fabric and the same construction and sit in different categories, and the customer will accept a price change in one and reject it in the other because her expectation of fit and feel differs. You only find that in the data.

Plus size at the same price

Sizing is where online fashion leaks money, because the customer cannot touch the fabric or judge the fit from a photograph, and every mistake comes back as a return.

Anuj claims to have been among the first Indian brands to introduce plus size properly, and is firm that it should not cost more. Many brands charge a premium for XL and above. His argument is that plus size is not a scaled-up medium: the proportions between upper and lower body are genuinely different, so it requires its own patterns, sampling and production line rather than a percentage increase on an existing block.

What each channel is actually for

His framing is clean. Marketplaces give you reach. Exclusive brand outlets give you brand value. D2C teaches you how to hold a customer relationship. None of them substitutes for another.

The company is now running 16 retail stores, having opened three in the previous month, with around six more due by early September. But the test for a store is not how it looks. Anuj wants each location independently viable, judged on whether it turns its stock rather than displays it. If the store is selling through and reordering, the products are in demand and the location works. If not, no amount of brand-building justifies it.

Signing Madhuri Dixit to open doors, not to sell kurtas

Nandani Creation signed Madhuri Dixit as brand ambassador in 2023, and the reasoning was operational rather than aspirational. The company wanted to move into offline retail, where entry normally means capex, deposits and staff costs.

An ambassador of that stature made the brand legible to mall developers and franchise partners in a way a strong online business alone did not. Anuj describes it as an asset-light way to buy entry into offline, and says doors opened once his team could put that name on the table.

AI is only as good as what you feed it

The company uses AI across design, selling and development, feeding it past sales data alongside trend and social signals. Anuj’s caution is the obvious one, delivered plainly: garbage in, garbage out. A model given weak sales history or a vague prompt returns confident noise.

His better framing is that it is not one prompt. You have to keep talking to it, the way you would brief an employee, and that only works if you already understand your own numbers.

Reach is not the business

He is sceptical of brands built on founder personas and enormous ad spend, and he is direct about why: he has watched labels with excellent social reach get destroyed by product quality, because reviews travel faster than campaigns. Marketing gets a fixed percentage of sales at Jaipur Kurti and every rupee has to return an ROI.

Asked to choose between a higher average order value and a higher repeat rate, he takes repeat without hesitation. His view on category expansion follows the same logic: you extend when average order value plateaus, because that is the customer signalling she has bought everything you sell. A new category is due before this festive season.

And the myth he most wants punctured is that reach is the goal. Most brands, he says, run for reach, get tired, and stop. The job is to sustain long enough that the point where others quit is where you begin.

Listen to the full conversation with Anuj Mundhra on FyndOutWithRagini.