Kangleimaichou

With four production facilities spread in and around Bangalore, Aquarelle India offers products in 100% cotton, pure linens and blends, and viscose blends, along with recycled, organic, and BCI products on sustainability lines, along with traceability details as to its raw-material source. According to its sustainability division head, Ravi Patil, "On sustainability, we are on par with the customers, and are also aligned with them as well as with the CIEL target. So sustainability is our key DNA."  As concerns over climate action pile up, calls for businesses in the fashion industry, one of the major polluters, to do more continue to grow louder. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the industry is the second-biggest consumer of water and is responsible for about 10% of global carbon emissions – more than all international flights and maritime shipping combined. However, many have responded by adopting an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) framework to a...

Many years before Hidesign was founded, Dilip Kapur was a big part of the ‘incredible idealism of changing the world’ that swept across many parts of the world in the 60s and 70s when he was in the US, where he lived for 15 years. When he returned to Puducherry’s Auroville in India, it was with a desire to recreate that world. “Then there was nothing. It was barren land. I was in a one-room house with no running water. There was a hand pump if we needed water,” he recalls. He started creating bags as a hobby, a craft that he had learned when he was finishing PHD at the University of Denver, School of International Studies in International Affairs. “I needed a job and had applied at many places, and joined a business. At this factory, I was trained in leather work.” Little did he know that a couple of decades later, this hobby would translate into one of the most successful homegrown luxury bag brands in India. Forty-five years after it was founded, major leather goods br...

Singapore-based ViSenze offers an AI-powered visual commerce platform that enables shoppers to search for products by using image instead of keywords. It counts Urban Outfitters, Meesho, Myntra, Zalora, and Rakuten, among its stable of customers. Started in 2012, ViSenze says it processes over a billion queries a month from retailers, supporting them in-store and on e-commerce sites. Use cases range from enhanced visual search, product tagging, smart product recommendations, and retail analytics. The Mission Most shoppers know exactly what they are looking for but have a hard time finding it using keywords, and often the recommendations are an overwhelming selection of unrelated products. To solve this, Oliver Tan, Co-Founder & CEO, ViSenze decided to launch his company with the mission of making finding products easier with smart AI. Working on deep learning and computer vision, the company decided to create a breakthrough technology solution for retailers that is po...