On the 4th of November 1982, my story began in the city of Kolkota also known as the city of joy. The former capital of India which has long been known for its literary, artistic and revolutionary heritage. After spending the first five years of my life in India, my family migrated to Hong Kong, which is where I lived for most of my childhood years. Luckily I had the opportunity to study abroad and spent my college days in New York. This is when I decided that the world of fashion is what I wanted to partake in. Thus to pursue this I moved to London to explore the opportunities it had to offer. After living, working and completing my masters there I decided to return to Hong Kong and live my dream of start a high end women's wear label - Kanchan Couture.

My identity is that of a hybrid world, influenced by all the people whom I have encountered in my life, the places I have visited and the cultures I have been exposed to. Being brought up by Indian parents their more traditional values were ingrained into me since a young age, thus my Asian roots have been one of the major influences of my design concept.

For me making the decision to start my own business has to be one of the hardest choices I have made, but also one of the greatest. When starting up young entrepreneurs often face a lot of negativity and pressure about age, experience etc. Not denying that it is extremely competitive and often takes years to build a name and make a profit, if it is really what you want, then you just have to be brave, take a risk, go out there and not come back till you have got it. The entrepreneur Sam Roddick once said to me <<If you know what you want then you need to be bold, take risks and just be ridiculous!!>>. Being passionate for what you do and taking risks are the two key values I instill upon my business.

I would like to leave you with a quote that inspires me daily:

<<I want to live deep and suck all the marrow of life to live so sturdily and sparten-like as to pout to rout all that was not life, to cut broad swath and shave close to dive life into a corner and reduce to its lowest terms and if it proved to be mean then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world, or if it were sublime to know it by experience>> -- Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

The world is yours to fashion!