In the current era, the Indian market is rapidly growing by adopting a wide range of concepts from all over the world either for business or fashion trends or any other new trends that are emerging globally. Fashion is one of the most rapidly changing industries based on new and emerging global trends. With the inspiration of art and fashion, an autodidactic designer from Ahmedabad, Babita Jain created an exclusive brand for designer scarves.
The journey of the fashion designer in Ahmedabad
The self-taught artist and designer, Babita Jain completed her graduation from Lady Shri Ram College in Delhi and then joined the garment export business of her family. She had three years of experience in a luxury brand environment along with fifteen years of experience in the garment industry. She had a love for fine arts and used to do paintings, but was not completely satisfied with this. With the motivation and inspiration from her daughter, Babita Jain understood that her main love for fabrics and art.
After this realization, Babita Jain launched her brand ‘House of Prana’ in 2018. The main aim of launching this brand is to provide Indian consumers with a wide range of scarves along with unique designs and vibrant colours. The current generation in India has widely adopted the concept of hybridization of culture. Starting from the young generation to adults, everyone in the current time is rapidly adopting diverse cultures and fashion trends. Babita Jain, considering this important factor and the importance of Indian culture, has efficiently adopted cultural hybridization for her products and maintained a balance of the mixture of modernity and tradition.
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Along with scarves, ‘House of Prana’ also provides a various range of house décor products such as cushions, clothes, trays and tablemats. The design of all these products is exclusively designed by Babita Jain and after the development of the design, the team of the company turned it out as a digital print that will be utilized for the products. As state by Babita Jain, the creative style of her work is abstract and the main aim of this approach is to evoke an emotional and therapeutic connection through her works. Prana mainly focuses on the unique and different requirements of customers and makes their products with hand-illustrated art and design. This quality of the brand mainly differentiates it in the market from other similar clothing brands. The utilization of vibrant colours, fresh hand-illustrated design for scarves makes it more attractive and unique.
The idea of connection to the customers through the emotional and therapeutic way by Babita Jain is another exclusive quality of Prana. Through her designer scarves which show both tradition and modernity, have an inimitable impression on the consumers. The main customers of the designer scarves are self-assured, independent and have a unique sense of trend-agnostic style. Women in the modern era are bold and independent, and the vibrant colour of the products with hand-illustrated designs shows the bold personality of a woman. The fabrics utilized for designer scarves are also premium quality such as Pashmina, Georgette, Ahimsa silk (Peace silk), and Pure silk. This self-taught designer, Babita Jain created her style of fashion designing by a unique amalgamation of art, culture and technology.
Challenges faced by Babita Jain
It not has been much time that ‘House of Prana’ has been launched in the Indian market and as a start-up company and entrepreneur, Babita Jain faced a wide range of challenges. Specifically, during the time of the pandemic. Only after two years of launching the business of designing scarves formally in the market, Babita Jain had to face a critical challenge in the form of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Initially, Prana started to provide its products and services through physical exhibitions, selling products from its official website in the markets like Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Goa, Nagpur and many others. But due to the outbreak of the pandemic, everything stopped all of the sudden due to the social distancing norm. Along with that, the demand for the products has also reduced drastically. Initially, customers reciprocated to the promotion of the brand and the demand for the designing scarves was increasing gradually. But due to the pandemic, consumers limited their spending on products. At a time like this, rather than focusing on the negative factors, Babita focused on how to maintain a minimum consistency in the sales. Thus, she started to provide her products, specifically designed scarves through e-commerce platforms like Natty and Nykaa Fashion. According to her statement during the interview with YourStory, the team of Prana mainly focused on advertising and social media promotion during the lockdown to increase the visibility of the brand as the competition is quite high in the market.
Along with all these challenges, another major challenge faced by Babita Jain is the lack of a workforce. The profit rate dramatically decreased during the time of the pandemic for Prana. And due to this reason, many workers left the company for better opportunities and to stay close to their families. With this major issue, she decided to hire freelancers. It has been observed that most of the companies when it comes to the development and growth of the business, do not hire freelancers. But according to Babita Jain, hiring freelancers in a critical situation was one of the effective decisions made by her because it helped her with reducing the problem lack of workforce and by working with the freelancers, she gained new and innovative ideas from the young generation which was beneficial for the brand.
Currently, the main aim of Babita Jain is to expand the business in the international market and make ‘House of Prana’ a global brand with value. She has also stated that she would prefer to expand the clothing options provided by the company based on the demand and requirements of the customers.
