How serious an enterprise is girls’ fashion? For Jacqueline Kapur, founder and CEO of Ayesha Accessories, it is pretty serious. Or, as she puts it, pretty and serious.
At 24, Jacqueline came to Auroville en-route, to visit friends. The holiday extended, and much like a happy-movie storyline, she fell in love and stayed on, building a home, becoming a mother and running multiple businesses with her husband Dilip Kapur, in the charming town of Pondicherry. Not one to believe in fairytales, I ask her the kind of challenges that the big decision to stay on threw up. “India has been great, professionally and personally. I’ve never had the feeling that I was cheated, was treated unfairly because I was a foreigner, a woman, or both,” Jacqueline says, surprising me with her unequivocal answer.
Years before she began Ayesha Accessories, in 2009, Jacqueline travelled the length and breadth of the country, sourcing material for Titanic, a garment outlet in Pondicherry that houses European styles at affordable prices. She also did the merchandising for Casablanca, an interior accessory store. “I used to love going to the remotest parts; I’ve been in the basements of shops in New Delhi, export surplus stores in Tirupur, in garment factories... I’ve been in the interiors of India, where you haven’t been,” she says, in her German brashness that doesn’t offend. She identifies herself as the hunter type, possessing a hawk-eye to spot that one good piece in a crowd. “Most of my retail experience came from working in the flea markets of Germany, and the instincts also developed there.”
It was on these travels that the idea for Ayesha began to take shape. Jacqueline discovered remarkably stylish and funky jewellery in unlikely corners. Her daughter Ayesha Kapur (the child from Black ) accompanied her on many of these journeys. “I used to drag my child everywhere, and she had a strong, reliable sense of fashion,” says Jacqueline. Ayesha continues to be the face of the eponymous brand, and her charisma, palpable in promotional material, has helped the brand create a niche identity and appeal to its target market.
While Jacqueline started Ayesha Accessories because she felt the need to build her own brand from scratch, it was not purely an emotional decision. There was no organised retail market for accessories in India, and much potential lay in that space, Jacqueline felt. “Both Accessorize and Claire’s are international brands, and for them, India is a by-product. What doesn’t get sold in the winter sales in the West gets shipped here.”
With a modest beginning as a glass kiosk in an Ahmedabad mall, Ayesha has now expanded to 28 exclusive stores across India, with a turnover of Rs. 12.5 plus crore. Being home-grown, the design strategy is also sensitive to regional variations across the country. What, for instance, sells or is popular in Delhi may not work for Chennai. The Northeast has a vastly different fashion inclination than the rest of India. So, these factors do go into the conceptualisation, built on initial research.
Prototypes of their new line, Project Girl Power, are strewn across the Ayesha office headquarters in Pondicherry. There is a beautiful incongruity of sorts, as contemporary fashion is housed in an ancient Tamil-Franco home. A bag says ‘Best Girl in Town’, a sticker says ‘I make boys cry’, a T-shirt bears the title ‘Be You tiful’. “It is a small way of sending out a message, a little funky, a little in-your-face. You wear something like that, it changes your attitude,” believes Jacqueline.
Attempts by fashion brands and magazines to appropriate messages of empowerment have been strongly criticised. Not only because they are perceived as superficial, but also because they advocate a certain kind of femininity. Jacqueline, however, has no illusions about the place of fashion in sending out these messages. She keeps it simple. “I am laying no claims to feminism. We don’t want to be aggressive either. For girls who are into our kind of fashion, these will be affirming.” Considering young girls are bombarded with images and messages that inadvertently make them feel insufficient, initiatives like Project Girl Power, perhaps, make a difference.
A small team with mostly women (a conscious decision, Jacqueline says), the camaraderie between them is evident. And this makes one rather curious about Jacqueline’s leadership style. “Working with horses has taught me how to be a good boss. A horse is 500-kilos heavy and rather strong; you need to apply something that is not violence; but it can’t be just cuddling either — there has to be a leadership with boundaries. If you make the boundaries too small, you crush the animal. If you use emotional or physical violence, repetitively, you break the animal. If you make the borders too free, they start running around like mad cows. But if you establish the yes and no, you keep the freedom; you will have a partner in the end. It is going to be a balanced relationship.” For Jacqueline, it is going to be a good ride.
