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In June 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok and several other Chinese apps, including popular fashion platforms that had quietly built enormous audiences among India's youngest consumers. One of the most significant vacuums left behind was in fast fashion. A generation of Indian women aged 18 to 26 had grown accustomed to scrolling through new styles daily, ordering trendy, affordable pieces within moments of discovering them, and expressing themselves through fashion w

India in 2022 was the world's fifth-largest economy, home to over 500 million millennials and Gen Z consumers who had grown up watching global fashion brands strut across their Instagram feeds. Zara was here. H&M was here. Marks & Spencer had its outposts in select malls. And yet, for a generation of Indian consumers who wanted international-grade fashion — structured quality, trend-led curation, premium presentation — at a price point that didn't require a second mortgage, t

In April 1989, four hardware engineers sat in a small apartment in Taipei, Taiwan, and made a decision that would eventually reshape global computing. They had all worked at Acer — one of Taiwan's most significant electronics companies of the era — and each of them had developed a specific, deep fluency with the machinery that made computers work: the motherboard. The founding team consisted of T.H. Tung, Ted Hsu, Wayne Hsieh, and M.T. Liao — four former hardware engineers fr

In the early 1960s, the washing machine arrived in European homes as a liberation. No more scrubbing boards. No more hours hunched over cold water and coarse soap. Just load, press the button, and wait. The revolution had arrived — and with it, an unexpected, frustrating paradox. Clothes weren't white enough. The detergents that had been formulated for hand-washing didn't translate to machine conditions. The mechanical action was different. The water temperatures varied. And

Calcutta in 1884 was a city of contradictions. The cultural capital of British India — home to poets, philosophers, and reformers — was simultaneously a city ravaged by epidemic diseases that moved through its densely populated bylanes with terrifying speed. Cholera killed without warning. Malaria was endemic. The poor, who lived in the most crowded conditions, had the least access to effective treatment. Existing medicines were expensive, often unavailable, and entirely beyo

Gaurav Khatri and Amit Khatri grew up in Bikaner — a Rajasthani city more famous for its bhujia and its forts than for producing technology entrepreneurs. As cousins, they shared a childhood in the same streets, the same schools, and the same restless desire to build something. Neither came from a business family. Neither had the head start that the more privileged founders of India's startup ecosystem often arrive with. What Gaurav had was a hunger for gadgets that bordered

There was no pitch deck. No market research firm. No consultant who advised them to enter the Indian beverage sector. There was just a kitchen in Punjab, a glass of something tangy, fizzy, and impossibly familiar — and three cousins who looked at each other and said: "This needs to be in a bottle." That afternoon became the origin story of Lahori Zeera — a brand that went from a home kitchen experiment to a ₹2,800 crore company without a single Bollywood face, without a massi

Before 2016, if you wanted a cake in India, your options were essentially two: walk into a neighbourhood bakery and pick from the five or six flavours they had on display that day, or call a few hours in advance and hope for the best. The neighbourhood bakery was often excellent within its own walls — but that excellence stopped at the street. There was no consistency across locations, no reliable online ordering, no standardised quality, and almost certainly no Tiramisu, Ban

In 2019, Sibabrata Das sat in Mumbai with one thought running on repeat. "Thirty days were all we had." Seven years of building. Hundreds of rejected funding pitches across every venture capital firm in India and abroad. Friends and well-wishers who had long advised both founders to simply take up jobs. And now, with Atomberg Technologies on the verge of shutting down, the co-founder of one of India's most ambitious engineering startups had exactly one month to change the sto

Savnit Arora Gurnani grew up in Lucknow. She studied Statistics Honours at Delhi University — not because she loved numbers, but because her parents believed it was the safer, more sensible path. What she actually loved was fashion, and she pursued it as quietly and persistently as she could alongside her degree, participating in events at IIT Kanpur and building a growing sense of where she actually wanted to be. After graduating, she enrolled in a Masters in Fashion Styling

In Rajasthan's Shekhawati region, where the land is dry and rainfall unreliable, migration was not a choice for many Marwari families — it was a survival strategy passed down through generations. Prahlad Rai Agarwala's father had made that journey, moving from Sikar district to Kolkata and establishing himself as a trader. Growing up in this environment, PR — as the family would always call him — absorbed early and deeply the Marwari belief that commerce was not merely a live

In 1895, on an ordinary morning in Brookline, Massachusetts, a travelling salesman named King Camp Gillette stood at his sink and tried to shave. The blade of his straight razor was dull. He would have to visit a barber or a cutler to have it sharpened — again. It was inconvenient, expensive, and for a man who spent his working life moving between cities, a persistent, nagging frustration. He stood there with the dull razor in his hand, and the idea arrived fully formed: what

Utkarsh Gupta was doing an MBA at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago. He jokes that he was actually doing a two-year MBA in sneakers. He wasn't entirely wrong. Chicago had always sat at the heart of sneaker culture — the city of Michael Jordan, of Air Jordan drops that caused queues stretching around city blocks, of streetwear that had evolved from the courts into the culture. During his time there, Utkarsh watched how American brands used sneakers not merely as foot

It was a warm night in March 1977. The phone rang at Xerxes Desai's home, and on the other end was his associate Anil Manchanda with a simple line: "There are five projects I've shortlisted. The best among them is watches." Neither man knew it yet, but that one sentence would set in motion a company that eventually redefined how an entire country thought about timekeeping, style, and self-expression. What followed wasn't an overnight success. It took years of building a case

There are very few stories in business history as instructive, as human, and as tragic as this one. It is the story of a company that did not fail because it lacked vision. It failed because it had the vision, built the future with its own hands, and then chose to bury it. The brand story of Kodak is not just about cameras and film. It is about what happens when a company falls so deeply in love with its own success that it cannot recognise the very future it created. A Boy W

It has gone bankrupt. It has been bought and sold. It has been dismissed, underestimated, and nearly buried more than once. Coca-Cola was offered the chance to purchase it three separate times — and declined on all three occasions. And yet, Pepsi not only survived. It became one of the most recognised, most studied, and most boldly marketed brands in the history of consumer goods. This is the story of how a small-town pharmacist's curiosity became a global empire — and how ev

In the late 1960s, India's largest cities were quietly experiencing a crisis that no headline captured adequately. Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras — the great urban centres of a newly independent nation — were growing rapidly, their populations swelling with migration and natural growth, their demand for basic foods rising faster than the country's fragile supply chains could keep up with. Milk, in particular, was a problem. Rural India produced milk. Urban India needed it. B

A woman leans over a motorcycle engine, her hands deep in the machinery, oil streaking her forearms. She's not watching someone fix the bike. She's doing it herself. The camera stays with her, watching her automotive engineering skills in action. Then the scene shifts. Another woman stands in front of a punching bag, striking it with focused intensity, her boxing training in full swing. These aren't casual hobby shots. These are deliberate images—women pursuing professions th

In the early 1940s, the farmers of Kaira district in Gujarat were trapped in a system designed to exploit them. Polson — a private dairy company — held a near-total monopoly over milk collection in the region, and through its network of traders and agents, set arbitrary, unfair prices for the milk that farmers worked every single day to produce. The farmers had no leverage. They had no alternative buyer. They simply had to accept whatever price they were given. In 1946, Sarda

In 1939, a 24-year-old Indian student named Burjor Godrej was deep into his PhD research at a prestigious university in Berlin, studying fatty acids and the chemistry of soap-making. He was meticulous, scientifically rigorous, and genuinely fascinated by a problem that had quietly frustrated chemists of his era: germ-killing ingredients worked well in antiseptics, but they simply would not hold their effectiveness when incorporated into soap. Then the Second World War broke o