Melding Style With Sustainability: Arundhati Kumar Cedes Her Corporate Climb to Found A Conscious Enterprise
A Cosmopolitan Childhood
Arundhati grew up with a sense of needing to excel in everything. Whether it was academics, dance, drawing or swimming, she always set up reach goals. Maybe this was partly inspired by her “helicopter” Mom. Raised in Kolkata, in a mixed-heritage family – her mother a Bengali, her father a Punjabi – she also retreated into books: “I always loved to read, so spent a lot of time reading.” When she wasn’t squabbling with her brother, who was not even a year older. In the meanwhile, she watched her father build his leather business from scratch, an endeavor that entailed long absences from the home.
But multilingual parents did not lead to a monolingual upbringing, as is often the case with families that use English as a bridge language. At La Martiniere, which she attended till the 10th Grade, she mastered Hindi as a second language while she absorbed Bengali from her Mom. “You could be speaking to Mom in any language possible, and she will answer in Bengali,” recalls Arundhati. As a result, she is equally conversant in English, Bengali and Hindi, reinforcing a versatility that was already cultivated by her wide-ranging activities. For her 11th and 12th Grades, she attended the Ajmer-based Mayo College Girls’ School – an institution that features among the most sought-after boarding schools in the country.
Extending Her Interest in Psychology in the Business World
After Mayo, she was pretty sure she wanted to be a psychologist. Eventually, she signed up for a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi. With her knowledge of herself evolving with each passing year, she discovered she did not want to be a professional psychologist anymore. So she signed up for an MBA at the FORE School of Management in Delhi. During her MBA, besides business courses, she also needed to grapple with unforeseen shock and grief: because around then, her brother succumbed to cancer.
Learning The Makeup Of Luxury At Taj Hotels
After FORE, she opted to join Taj Hotels. Her first posting was at the iconic Lake Palace in Udaipur, considered one of the marquee properties inside the Taj Group. As a young trainee, shepherding such a high-end brand was both thrilling and nerve-racking. While customer expectations of “luxury” can often be overwhelming, it was also an excellent training ground on the nitty-gritties that constitute splendor. Which emerges from the tiniest details, including the manner in which the staff is clothed.
Till then, Arundhati did not know how to wear a sari, and suddenly she had to wear it impeccably: “A lot about the way I dress, the way I talk, the way I like my home to look, I think a lot of that comes from my early years at the hotel.” Besides her childhood art lessons had already fostered an aesthetic sensibility. While she never cared as much for the latest trends in fashion, she “mostly had an inherent sense of style.”
A First Stab At Founding A Company
Later in her career, after a few years in banking and consulting, she took her “first stab at turning entrepreneur.” Her accessories company, called Pinwheel, allowed customers to tailor-make bags, catering to individual whims. “You could say, I want these straps, those pockets, this lining. Everything was modular.” While the idea was certainly avant-garde, she ran into personal obstacles at that point. As the mother of a three-year-old who was being raised in Mumbai, she hadn’t envisaged how the startup – headquartered in Delhi – would claim more time than she could accord it, at that stage. Though she had partnered with an ex-colleague from Deutsche Bank, she needed to spend more than 20 days at Delhi. “I was missing everything, my daughter’s Parent-Teacher meets, her Sports Day and at some point, I decided I didn’t want to do that anymore.”
Managing Creative Teams at Conde Nast
Swiveling back to a corporate job, she joined Conde Nast India as their Head of HR. This was her first intimate brush with the world of high fashion. As the media house that produces Vogue, GQ, Conde Nast Traveler and Architectural Digest, the workspace was starkly different from her earlier corporate stints. As Arundhati notes with a chuckle: “I had a culture shock of epic proportions in just seeing what people wear to office. I was like, ‘How is this even allowed?’”
Besides the zany workwear, Arundhati was also privy to how creative minds required a different management style altogether. After her straightjacketed banking and consulting years, she intuited that designers, writers, photographers, editors and other offbeat thinkers needed a different toolset. While they certainly required more autonomy to function optimally, too much freedom would run up against magazine deadlines. As Arundhati puts it, you need to find a prudent middle ground: “Giving too much a brief is a problem, giving too little of a brief is a problem.”
She also picked up invaluable lessons on the fashion worlds in London and New York. “Those insights were like a window into a world I didn’t know.” Arundhati herself started following the works of various fashion designers. She hadn’t realized how the fashion scene in India had burgeoned beyond the three or four widely-known names. Till then, she had been mostly indifferent to the iconic Lakme Fashion Week. Conde Nast brought her up to speed with brightly lit ramps, strutting models and the morphing silhouettes of savvy new designers.
Learning Life Lessons From Leadership Consulting
Busy with personal family issues in the interim, Arundhati then sought a break from work. Later she returned to Consulting, with an organization called Leadership Centre, founded by K. Ramkumar, the erstwhile Executive Director on the Board of ICICI Bank. In that space, Arundhati gleaned many valuable life and management lessons. Besides working with clients, she also attended many meetings with Ram. After every joint meeting, where Ram often shared his insights, Arundhati always felt: “Shit, this can change my life! Why didn’t I think about this earlier?”
At one time, she recalls a conversation on ambition. This was the kind of organization where deeper questions were explored. Ram believed that “ambition” was internal, defined differently perhaps by each individual. His take on it was: “What’s more to me than there is already?” That was a definition that resonated strongly with Arundhati, and also set her pondering her own life journey.
At that point, she had spent about 17 years in HR. She could persist in the function, heading Human Resources for larger and larger organizations. But she felt a path of sameness would leave other dimensions of her persona unexplored. For instance, the entrepreneurial spark that had been doused by circumstances. After two years at The Leadership Centre, she felt ready to found something on her own.
Exploring Startup Ideas
She didn’t have an idea yet for the enterprise. While searching for options, she had a conversation with her businessperson father. All along, he had been flummoxed by Arundhati’s career choices. He had always wondered why she didn’t helm his business instead of working with other companies. Besides, Arundhati was the only possible next-generation heir. Her father’s business revolved around leather exports. Arundhati wasn’t sure yet if that was a business that gripped her entirely.
During that phase of ambivalence, she set out on a holiday to Europe, accompanied by her daughter and friends. She promised to continue the conversation with her father, on her return. The year was 2019, the first year that massive heat waves rippled across Europe. Even as Arundhati and her group trekked through vividly memorable places, they couldn’t help but feel how “climate change” could no longer be confined to theoretical quibbles. The kids in their group – Arundhati’s daughter and two others – were struggling with the heat. After all, most European cities had not been designed to withstand temperature spikes. In most places, “there were no fans, no air-conditioners.”
When she returned to India, she realized she wanted to contribute tangibly to the climate change solution. She started thinking about sustainable alternatives to her Dad’s business. Even as she googled materials, and started reading up on the latest research, her father was wary about pivoting his enterprise. He said, “My business makes money. And it’s been painstakingly been built over many, many years, so no, not happening.”
Seeding Studio Beej
Though she didn’t have market research backing her idea yet, she had a sense that sustainable alternatives to leather were going to become big. After all, did the planet have a choice anymore? “That’s really how Beej started for me.” The idea was to make bags and other accessories from materials like cork, pinatex (made from pineapple leaf fibre), desserto (a plant-based leather drawn from cactus) and khesh (a form of weaving in West Bengal that combines new yarn with old saris).
By kickstarting the business in January 2020, Arundhati, like the rest of the planet, hadn’t foreseen the pandemic. “14th January we opened our business, and by the third week of March, we were in our first lockdown.” While the first year was understandably fraught, since then Studio Beej has been on an upward trajectory. Besides India, where their products sell online and across a few offline outlets, they are also available in Australia. They are currently exploring exports into other markets like the UK and the US.
Naturally, the marketing is complex, since Beej is not just selling familiar products but establishing a new category. Arundhati is also emphatic about making the accessories stylish. By combining the best of Indian craftsmanship with carefully researched and consciously-sourced ecological materials, Studio Beej is helping foster not just a more conscientious present, but a viable future.
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