From the Ground Up

Market Yard’s Moksha Shah on years served before years owned, the quiet economics of customisation, and why she still believes Pune is waiting for its next great label.

Four years before there was a boutique with her name attached to it, Moksha Shah was folding clothes that belonged to someone else’s label, fetching thread from the market, learning a trade from the ground up rather than the top down. It is not the version of the story most young designers choose to tell, and that, increasingly, seems to be Shah’s point.

Pitasha, her boutique in Pune’s Market Yard, has just turned two — though the story begins far earlier, in childhood, with her mother’s sarees and a needle she taught herself to use. A degree in fashion from Kolhapur followed, then a deliberate refusal to rush. “I had to go to some job, to some stores, where I can have a really good experience, so that I can start my own boutique.” Two or three jobs and four years later, Pitasha opened its doors — and Shah has been evangelical about that sequencing ever since. “Who wants to succeed has to get the experience. That is for sure, very compulsory.”

Ask where the money went first and the answer is immediate: inventory. Not marketing, not premises — fabric. “When we invest a lot of money at the start, we invest a lot mentally too,” she says. “We don’t know what people are going to like, what people are not going to like. Some things which don’t run out create a hurdle for us.” Capital, sitting still, waiting to be wanted.

That exposure was compounded by the problem of being unknown. Pitasha opened among Marwari and Gujarati households with settled tastes; for a long stretch, custom came almost entirely from relatives. “I was feeling personally — is it okay that we have started this business here, will it run or not — because the footfall was very less.” The stakes of a single misstep are steep. “If you make ten outfits really good and one outfit slightly not up to the mark, they’ll directly write it down in the review. That is a very major risk that can ruin our name.”

Pitasha’s answer to that risk is breadth — casualwear and ethnic wear, Indian and Western, for men, women and children. Its other organising principle is working within a client’s budget without surrendering finish. “That doesn’t come at the cost of quality and finishing,” Shah says. The adjustment happens elsewhere — fabric choice, small shifts in pattern — so that, as she puts it, “he can also get his budget, and I can also get my client.”

It is a philosophy shaped by a wider shift she has watched take hold: a steady migration from ready-made towards bespoke. “Everyone in the family, most families, want to get it customised into their size, their colour, their thing — they don’t want to see anybody else wearing the same thing.” She is particularly attuned to plus-size customers, long underserved by ready-to-wear. “If I am a plus-size figure, I’ll go for customisation only, because I want to wear it” — less empathy than plain commercial logic.

On the question of advice for graduates eager to skip straight to the label, Shah is unsentimental: take the internship, even if it means menial work. “Even if they are told to fold clothes or go to the market and get threads, they will get to know the market — what is going out, what are the rates, how people manage.” The first months test nerve more than skill. “This is just a start,” she says. “Once your patience has built up, no one else can do it for you.” Effort, in her telling, is its own currency: “If the designer can see that effort, she will not leave you alone.”

A name, in Shah’s telling, gets made not by spectacle but by accumulation — of skill, of patience, of small things done properly. She keeps her closing line equally spare. “We would like to be one of the best designers in Pune and India.” Given how she got here, it reads less like ambition than a logical next step.