Anjali Patel Mehta, Founder of Verandah, Navigates a Remarkable Pivot from Banking into Fashion
A Bohemian Childhood
Anjali Patel Mehta, the founder of Verandah, a resort and lounge wear brand, did not envisage her future in fashion.
After all, she was climbing the rungs in Investment Banking, as one of the few selected into an elite cohort at Deutsche Bank. Till then, despite her own ambivalence about a long-term finance career, banking recruiters had pursued her, keen to imbue their workplaces with her financial acuity and zesty persona.
Growing up in Mumbai, Anjali recalls a childhood marked by the limits and liberties of a rather bohemian household. Her Tam-Brahm mother, trained as an artist at the Cholamandal Artists Village near Chennai, had eloped with her college crush – whom she encountered during her Table Tennis days. Anjali’s father earned his Bachelor’s in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Doctorate from Yale.
In their Mumbai home, Patel Mehta recalls the manner in which housework was always equitably distributed between her parents, after her grandmother passed away where mum was the homemaker but her father also loved to cook. Or the manner in which her mother’s artist friends, painters like Badri Narayan, held court to an enthralled audience of kids and adults. Or how her maternal grandmother ensured that Anjali and her sister travel in third-class train compartments on temple visits to the south, so they would encounter the country as most other Indians did. “You have to know your culture, deal with it and embrace it,” her grandmother used to say and enjoy the ride. Besides memorizing verses from the Bhagavad Gita, Anjali trained in Bharatanatyam.
Such rigor was accompanied by an exposure to the avant-garde. Anjali’s mother ushered her children to spaces like the Bombay Arts Society or the Samovar Café, which hosted people like V.S. Naipaul and M.F. Hussain in its heydays, even while she urged her daughters to work hard but stay original. It was the kind of upbringing that drove Patel Mehta to pursue purpose rather than money.
Embarking on a Finance Career
Yearning too for more expansive pastures, Anjali joined Wellesley College, with an intent to major in Architecture. But inside the liberal arts program, she found herself captivated by the mechanics of markets and the conjectures of game theory. Some of this fascination for finance had been seeded in childhood, by her grandfathers. One, a deeply-cerebral investor, who had penned a book on the stock market, the other, a Governor of the RBI and a Chairman of the State Bank of India.
But unlike most of her finance peers at Wellesley, Anjali wanted to break into an overwhelmingly-male space: the trading floor. She joined the Wellesley Investment Society (WIS), and spearheaded an enterprising team that was determined to land internships at Wall Street. That year, the Wall Street Journal had run a feature, citing the cheering but also daunting fact that nearly 50% of the women in Wall Street were graduates of Wellesley. Patel Mehta and her friends cold-called all the alums in the big firms. Then a busload of gritty Wellesley women from WIS drove to New York, shedding their overnight pajamas and slipping into suits on the bus, to shadow executives inside target companies. “We didn’t have a place to stay in New York, so we would pull into the city at 5 a.m., change into stockings, then ring the bell at JP Morgan.”
In her sophomore year, Anjali landed an internship at Merrill Lynch. Though the banking hours were already sapping, she also opted to work at a clothing store, a Banana Republic outlet, between 8:30 p.m. and midnight. “I got to know about garments,” she says, an experience that might have planted an interest that would stay untapped for the foreseeable future. For her Junior year internship, she had offers from Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs Equities, and she chose the latter.
After her stint at Goldman Sachs, she joined the Fortress Investment Group. After an exhilarating stint under Michael Novogratz, currently the CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners and a Wallstreet legend, she moved on to work at the New York City Department of Education. As part of Joel I Klein’s restructuring project that aimed to usher greater accountability to the public school system, she realized she had a proclivity to working in the non-profit space. She then consulted for Acumen (earlier known as the Acumen Fund), a venture founded by Jacqueline Novogratz, which was focused on impact investing in developing countries.
To reskill herself for the social venture space, Patel Mehta entered the Indian School of Business (ISB). After her MBA, she opted to join Deutsche Bank’s Global Markets International Associates Program. She was also getting married then, so she tripped out of her own wedding reception to board a flight to New York, the henna designs of a new bride glowing vividly red on her hands.
Launching her Boho-Luxe Enterprise
Though she recalls her time at Deutsche Bank with great fondness, by 2009 the intense travel and working hours had taken a toll on her health. She was advised a major spinal surgery, after which her lungs collapsed. But even as she recovered her health and gave birth to her first child, new plans were brewing.
After years of medication , she had gained weight and found a gap in the market for chic, soft, well-tailored lounge clothes that catered to hot climates. She longed for super-soft, well-styled outfits, but couldn’t find them anywhere.
That summer, she started buying larger quantities of fabric, and fashioning clothes for herself and friends. “I cut patterns from newspapers. I started making clothes with cotton, voile – very soft fabrics. Basically, I wanted to make chic, holiday clothing, for times when you want to wear clothes that are super comfy.”
With encouragement from close circles for more outfits, she hosted a “trunk show” at home. During the informal home exhibition, one of the visitors was Mrs. Krishnakumar, the wife of the former General Manager of Taj. She was quick to support this effort and ordered from her sample collection for all the Taj Properties.
Starting out with one sewing machine, one employee – her tailor, Deepak – and a capital investment of Rupees 1,70,000, Patel Mehta sold out her first large order – through Taj stores across the country – at three times the original price. While this reinforced a nascent demand for such clothes, it also alerted her to the potential value of her creations. From thereon, there was no looking back: “I could have gone back to banking, but this was creative and so much fun.”
In the meanwhile, she also bolstered her technical know-how. She researched specific textiles, and ordered particular “constructions” – like the “highest Egyptian-count cotton.” She persuaded mill owners to customize fabrics for her. As her reputation rippled beyond her immediate contacts, she started drawing the attention of experts. Priya Tanna, a fellow young mom, the then editor of the Vogue was a steady support in her early years and Anjali is grateful for that guidance even today.
Patel Mehta’s admission into the intensely-competitive Lakme show underlined her originality and savvy in the new domain. In the meanwhile, she also educated herself about the social aspects of fashion. She watched the documentary True Cost, directed by Andrew Morgan and read accounts about sweatshop labor. Since members of her husband’s family produced textiles, she sought factory wastes that she could transform into one-off outfits.
Moreover, she started using her prints and fabrics to tell meaningful stories. She collaborated with an Austrian company called Lenzing, which made wood-based fibers. And with the Japanese firm Asahi Kasei to use Bemberg – a cotton linter-based fiber made from regenerated cellulose. Weaving Indian crafts into her designs, she collaborated with the Ajrakh master craftsman, Sarfraz Katri, to create Ajrakh jackets for a Lakme show titled Paramaparik Karigar.
Plunging boldly into another unknown, she applied to participate in the Miami Swim Week – with her biodegradable, wood and plant-based swim and lounge wear. At the discerning Miami show, Anjali’s hand-embroidered, printed kaftans and upcycled denims drew interest from buyers like Nieman Marcus and Moda Operandi.
Growing a Consciously Sustainable Enterprise
Verandah currently retails at hotels, specialty boutiques and luxury stores at Paris, New York, Miami and Athens and features in many of international shows. While their swimwear is entirely Italian-made, their other products are made in India. Verandah also intends to change perceptions about a “Made in India” brand, since most contemporary customers are reluctant to pay higher prices for products made in the country. “I’m on a mission to break that mindset while committing to sustainability,” says Patel Mehta.
At this stage, Patel Mehta has twenty-four people working for her in Mumbai. She also deploys the craftsmanship of 20 to 25 hand embroiderers or kaarigars. This season, Verandah is also working with a cluster in Bengal as part of a non-profit effort called Baradari. The initiative, founded by Namrata Zakaria and Kareena Kapoor Khan, aims to support the best indigenous craftpersons and artisans during the Covid pandemic. Patel Mehta commissioned very fine Bengal muslin from one of the Bengal producers. One of the company’s latest collections includes kaftans and shirts made from the finest Bengal muslin. Using such projects, Anjali hopes to showcase hand-made Indian crafts in international luxury markets.
She’s also reinventing the label, strongly weaving social consciousness and compelling stories into her garments. They have recently been launched as part of the Austrian-headquartered Lenzing’s MakeItFeelRight Campaign that endorses a few select brands for their strong ecological approach. Fellow brands endorsed by the campaign include Lavender Hill in the U.K. and Reformation in the U.S.
Verandah has also adopted a sandbank in Assam through an organization called Sankalp Taru. They have committed to planting trees in the Molai forest, with one tree planted for every purchase from Verandah. Each quarter, they will be adopting different sections of the forest and adding 500 trees. Customers who buy a piece of clothing from Verandah can also track the tree planted in their name, remotely watch its growth over time and add more trees if they wish to. Moreover, their brand has been leather-free for the past six years, and they only use fair-trade, organic-certified cotton.
In addition to fostering the Molai forest, they have also adopted a coral reef in the Andamans through an organization called the Reef Watch. “We’re working on reef regeneration projects,” says Patel Mehta.
Simultaneously, they are planning to get their enterprise accredited with The Butterfly Mark, that certifies that all systems, processes, and supply chains are in keeping with contemporary ESG+ (Environmental, Social, Governance + Innovation) framework. “We are very proud to be as transparent as we can possibly be,” adds Patel Mehta. Such tight monitoring of every aspect of the business is not easy, especially given some of the supply chain complexities. But like any other conscientious enterprise, they are constantly learning and refining their methods.
Such careful attention to sustainability also means that they cannot operate in the mass market business; so they’re very clear about operating in the niche luxury segments to scale the business, which is also a substantive market size in economic terms.
Patel Mehta is also on the Board of Tiger Watch, an organization that attempts to turn tiger poachers into tiger watchers. For one of her Lakme shows, she used prints that signified endangered tigers, inviting tiger-worshipping drummers from Nagpur to lend their distinct beat to the event. Even as she expands nationally and internationally, she’s very clear that she’s in the business for the long-term, with a clear value-driven purpose: “We need to make luxury as sustainable as we can.”
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