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Speaking over Zoom, days before his debut as the first Indian designer to appear on the Paris Fashion Week men’s schedule, Kartik Kumra is in the throes of planning. He’s just returned home to Delhi from a road trip through India to shoot the campaign in the sandstone mines of Jodhpur, and has yet to finalise a casting director for the presentation on Sunday.
“Things are a little crazy over here,” he says with surprising composure. “Everything’s happening and we’re just trying to make sure it happens right.”
It’s been just three years since the wunderkind graduated with an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and — with no fashion experience beyond flipping shoes and streetwear online — launched his menswear brand. Today, Kartik Research has 48 stockists worldwide, an LVMH Prize nomination under its belt and seven-figure revenues. However, its fast rise has come with twists and turns, including a trademark dispute that forced a change in name at the end of 2023.
When Kumra started his label, it consisted of one-off upcycled vintage kantha (Indian running stitch embroidery) jackets. There were challenges from the offset: as a 20-year-old designer searching for manufacturing units in India that would support his one-off sampling pieces, he was often turned down. Then, he found a factory on the brink of shutdown. With one sampling tailor and one production manager, the first collection of approximately 40 pieces launched on the brand’s Instagram page. When Lewis Hamilton and Kendrick Lamar decided to wear one of those early-day pieces, Kumra had to quickly scale.
“What I’m wearing right now,” he says, adjusting his laptop camera for me to get a better glimpse at the colourful carefully crafted piece, “is a good example of how we’ve scaled the product to meet the demand of [minimum] quantities while maintaining the artisanship that is core to the brand.” The garment he wears is a jacket made using the Godhri technique found in Maharashtra, India. “We made 80 of these, hand embroidered by 30 women over four-and-a-half months,” he says. Other pieces, such as hand-embroidered shirts, can be produced in hundreds or even thousands.
Priced at an average of £270, and closer to £1,000 for its heavier embellished hand-embroidered denim pieces, Kartik Research’s clothes can be found through retailers like Ssense, 10 Corso Como and Selfridges (where it hangs beside Loewe menswear). Mr Porter was an early adopter as part of its Small World edit of responsible craft brands from around the world. “Kartik Research’s ability to define craftsmanship in a contemporary way is what sets it apart,” says buying director Daniel Todd.
International wholesale remains a priority as the majority of Kartik Research’s customers live outside India. “Returns would kill our margin,” he explains. “Even with a 5 per cent return rate, custom duties and taxes are too high to ever venture into DTC (direct-to-consumer) for our international clients.” However, in India, the designer is keen to shorten the feedback loop. Next month, the brand opens its first brick-and-mortar store in affluent Delhi district Greater Kailash II, with a multi-designer format featuring brands from New York (such as Small Talk Studios, Sage Nation), as well as Kumra’s own sub-brand “Research Research” consisting of a line-up of graphic streetwear pieces.
Feedback has always been key for the designer. During the brand’s early days, Kumra was part of a Discord chatroom linked to ‘Throwing Fits’, the men’s lifestyle podcast and community generator run by Lawrence Schlossman and James Harris. There, he would share real-time updates of the brand’s making process in India.
Schlossman remembers immediately thinking that the brand had a unique perspective and would resonate with the culture of menswear clothing at a core level. “With menswear, there’s always been an under-the-hood mentality that appeals to anyone spending their dollars,” he says. “To know where things come from and how they’re made is super important to a menswear shopper.” This, he says, is directly feeding into the artisanal trend of brands like Wales Bonner, Bode and so many more that are emerging and flourishing today. (‘Throwing Fits’ became a longtime collaborator for Kartik Research, including a recent edit by the duo, which sold via Mr Porter.)
What’s in a name?
The presentation in Paris comes at the right time for Kartik Research, which is in the midst of a rebrand. It was launched as Karu Research (Kumra’s friends and industry peers know him as Karu), but the brand was approached by a third party alleging a trademark conflict. In December 2023, it announced that “after a long deliberation process, the brand has made the commercial decision to change names.”
Is it a difficult transition for an emerging brand? “It’s super challenging and really stressful,” says Kumra. “To have a big brand approach you with something like that… it can prove to be a logistical nightmare as well. You have to build your brand identity again.” However, it could have been worse: “We were fortunate that we were never a logo-driven brand and the product is the same.” None of the brand’s stockists cancelled orders, and the SS24 collections are still being delivered worldwide.
Ultimately, he chalks the incident up to growth in global awareness of the brand, which is no bad thing. This has partly been driven by the LVMH Prize — Kartik Research reached the semi-final in 2023. “That experience was super positive,” he recalls. “You meet cool people and I’m still in touch with a bunch of the designers that became friends.” But Kartik Research didn’t make the finals. “It was the lack of familiarity with the brand. No one had heard our name except for a few. We were too young and new.”
Typically the brands nominated at prizes such as this have graduated from schools like Central Saint Martins, they have at least one show review by a major title, or they have been recognised by programmes like the BFC NewGen, he tells me. “I wish we had something like this in India. We were just more of an indie brand born on Instagram, doing pop-ups in New York in the menswear scene there.”
Kumra saw it as a challenge. Returning to India from the LVMH Prize semi-finals, he signed an international PR agency, hosted more pop-ups in the country, did more press interviews, and when the time came, applied to be on the official fashion week calendar. “I don’t expect the presentation to be revolutionary in terms of sales, but it will further grow awareness,” says Kumra, who chose a presentation format over a show so that people can come up close and really see the handwork and hours of labour and love that go into each crafted garment.
At the presentation, Kartik Research will tease a new collaboration dropping in September (Kumra won’t say more). Collaborations are a large part of how Kartik Research works. Stepney Workers Club, Rkive City, Small Talk Studios, ‘Throwing Fits’: it’s a long list for a brand that’s three years old.
Instead of depending on the production of a larger brand, Kumra, with his in-house production team of 15 tailors and a separate embroidery atelier and 50 different fabric and textile vendors across India, prefers to tackle production himself. This provides him creative freedom, he explains. And creative freedom is immensely important for Kumra, who has turned down several investors. “I want to be the next big fashion house out of India,” he says, citing Dries Van Noten as a business standard he holds himself to. “30-plus years remaining independent, that’s impressive stuff.”
It all comes back to why Kumra about-turned from a financial career in New York to launch a slow craft brand out of India. “The premise of the brand is to be a vessel for Indian artisanship. Something I struggled with growing up was the idea that Indians are not able to make nice things in India outside of things like weddingwear. That, and the frustration of not seeing Indians represented in the way I wanted them to be.”
“You know all that they say about the American dream. I think there is a version of the Indian dream alive today. The creative startup ecosystem in the country, the youth willing to take risks and self-funding businesses, and eventually scaling them… It’s all happening in India right now.”
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