Aditya Birla Group-owned Sabyasachi Couture has appointed Manish Chopra as its new CEO. Chopra joins Sabyasachi from Shein India, where he was senior leader under Reliance Retail’s partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion group.
Sabyasachi Couture Appoints Manish Chopra As Its New CEO
Sabyasachi is the first Indian luxury fashion brand to collaborate with Estée Lauder, Christian Louboutin, Pottery Barn, H&M and Starbucks. In 2021, Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Limited acquired a 51% stake in the brand for ₹398 crore. Today, Sabyasachi has flagship stores across India and in New York and a jewellery store in Dubai.
Recently, Sabyasachi Couture appointed Manish Chopra as its new CEO. Chopra joins Sabyasachi from Shein India, where he was senior leader under Reliance Retail’s partnership with the Chinese fast-fashion platform. He has a background in technology, retail and consumer markets, having begun his career at Crompton Greaves Consumer Electricals and PwC, before taking on roles at Oracle and Microsoft, where he was chief operating and marketing officer in Indonesia.
An entrepreneur too, Chopra founded Zovi.com and co-founded Little Internet, and later led partnerships for Meta in India. His appointment signals Aditya Birla’s intention to scale Sabyasachi’s operations further, as Indian luxury brands look to position themselves in the global market while meeting rising domestic demand.
About Sabyasachi
Sabyasachi Mukherjee graduated with honours from the National Institute of Fashion Technology in Kolkata. From a young age, he was ambitious and envisioned creating India’s biggest luxury fashion brand, rejecting job offers from top Indian designers to pursue his dreams. In 1999, he borrowed INR 20,000 from his family and launched his eponymous fashion label with a small team of just three people.
By 2002, Sabyasachi made his debut at Lakmé Fashion Week with a show named “Kashgaar Bazaar,” where he introduced his multi-cultural bohemian aesthetic that fused art, craft, culture, and high-quality textiles. He became one of the first Indian designers to combine contemporary silhouettes with Indian heritage crafts. Sabyasachi’s international recognition grew when he showcased at Mercedes-Benz New Asia Fashion Week in Singapore, which led to opportunities to work in Paris with Jean Paul Gaultier and Azzedine Alaia. His 2003 collection named “Kora,” featuring unbleached, handwoven fabrics with Kantha embroidery, solidified his reputation as a designer committed to artisanal craftsmanship.
Sabyasachi quickly became one of the first Indian luxury fashion brands to retail overseas, with a presence in London’s Browns and debuting at Milan Fashion Week with a collection titled “The Frog Princess,” blurring the lines between pret and haute couture. His influence continued to grow as he was recognized as one of Asia’s most influential Indians by Asia Inc. and was featured on British Vogue’s Hot List. There was no looking back as he opened stores across India, a flagship in New York and a jewellery store in Dubai.
Committed to preserving India’s artisanal crafts, Sabyasachi initiated projects like ‘Save the Saree’. Sabyasachi empowers and enables the finest of Indian crafts by working with craftspeople and craft clusters on models of economic sustainability. Over the last two decades, Sabyasachi has identified India’s finest weavers, block printers, embroiderers, dyers, craftspeople, goldsmiths, mill workers, stone masons, furniture artisans working with jewellery, clothing, leather and interiors—and has established financially sustainable practices and long term relationships.
Today, Sabyasachi employs about 1,000 craftspeople across his ateliers. Having created a wave of reverse migration of artisans back to the villages and towns across the state of Bengal and to the city of Calcutta, he has worked with over 3,000 craftspeople, master weavers and artisans from across the country over the past two decades. Sabyasachi believes that the future of artisanal crafts and handwoven textiles is in preserving and reviving the finest of India’s legacy crafts to create exceptional heirloom quality products. Today, Aditya Birla Group has a 51 percent stake in the brand.
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Jasmeen Dugal is Associate Editor at FashionABC, contributing her insights on fashion, technology, and sustainability. She brings with herself more than two decades of editorial experience, working for national newspapers and luxury magazines in India.
Jasmeen Dugal has worked with exchange4media as a senior writer contributing articles on the country’s advertising and marketing movements, and then with Condenast India as Net Editor where she helmed Vogue India’s official website in terms of design, layout and daily content. Besides this, she is also an entrepreneur running her own luxury portal, Explosivefashion, which highlights the latest in luxury fashion and hospitality.
