| For a few hours this month I joined India’s top 1%, browsing in the most opulent store I’ve seen, confident that the only Sabyasachi experience I’m likely to ever have is the interview I was about to sit down for. Only to find out that I may be (figuratively speaking) among the new customers India’s top couturier is eyeing as his core business changes. Sabyasachi Mukherjee, who cannily built the country's largest luxury brand around Indians’ love for extravagant weddings (beautiful brides are also great marketing, he says), is in market-expansion mode. He’s hoping to ride a wave of rising affluence, tax compliance and nationalism in what could be the world's third-largest economy by 2030. “I'm building Sabyasachi for the next generation, not for the current generation,” Mukherjee said.  At the Sabyasachi store in Mumbai. Watch excerpts from the interview here. Photographer: Abhishek Jain/Bloomberg It’s a well-timed pivot. Globally the luxury industry, after a period of record profits, has hit a wall. Sales have plateaued in China, the biggest driver of growth in the last five years. Elsewhere, brands are over-exposed, high prices are hurting demand among aspirational consumers and clients are more interested in luxury experiences and not just goods, according to a McKinsey report in January. With the world’s fastest-growing ultra-high-net-worth population, India is among the new luxury hotspots, drawing an influx of international retailers. Sixty brands have entered the country since 2020 and 27 of them in the last year alone, shows JLL India data. But it’s still a very small luxury market (about one-seventh of China’s), vulnerable to a slowing economy and tricky to succeed in due to low per capita spends and a preference for jewelry and cosmetics. Chanel sells apparel in just one store in India, beauty products in many more. Bulgari sells a $5,000 mangalsutra (wedding necklace) online, among other things.  Christian Dior unveiled its Fall 2023 collection in Mumbai on March 30, 2023. Photographer: Indranil Mukherjee/AFP Mukherjee is betting on India’s heritage and youth. “For a long time whatever India had was appropriated by the West,” he said. “But today, with a more sensible, discerning, globally connected audience, they are going to buy luxury products from companies who have their provenance right.”
If once luxury purchases in India were the prevail of old money or black money (illegal or untaxed income), now the market has enlarged to include self-made Indians who are more likely to be tax-paying, hence conscious about consumption and confident of their national identity. “There was a time when people shopped price because they were under-confident. When people become confident, they shop value,” he said. The Kolkata-based designer is adding price points and products — from more “entry-level” bridal sarees and apparel to fine jewelry, bags, eyewear, perfumes, beauty products and someday designer homes and hotels. A range no other Indian designer has attempted before.  Mukherjee says he’s selling fewer bridal lehengas (skirts) and more sarees that can be worn more frequently. Photographer: Abhishek Jain/Bloomberg At an estimated $60 million in revenue this fiscal, the House of Sabyasachi is still insignificant in size, especially for a designer who says he’s eyeing a spot among global brands such as Chanel and Hermes that are almost 300 times bigger. Luxury brands take at least a hundred years to build, says the 51-year-old designer who has no successor. In 2021, right after the pandemic, Mukherjee sold a 51% stake to billionaire Kumar Mangalam Birla’s retail company. Mukesh Ambani’s retail business was wooing him too, but Mukherjee picked Birla, who he’s known for a long time. Mukherjee described him as a “very quiet man” who “stays behind the scenes.” That partnership and learnings from collaborations with the likes of Christian Louboutin, Estee Lauder, H&M and Bergdorf Goodman (where he now retails jewelry) should bolster the label’s expansion in the face of capital, talent and distribution challenges.
Mukherjee is in no rush. “The luxury business is valued on how much you build the intangible without destroying it.” I’ve yet to own anything Sabyasachi. What about you? Are you a big spender on designer products? Write to me at indiaedition@bloomberg.net. | 
