Abhishek Agarwal: The fashionable outsider

Popular television character Carrie Bradshaw once said: “I like my money where I can see it… it's hanging in my closet.'' With someone like Abhishek Agarwal, who describes himself as one of the “rare engineers who like to dress up'', who knows? Can you blame her? Agarwal is the 35th founder of Purple Style Lab, which has since taken the luxury retail industry by storm with investments from actors like Madhuri Dixit. Market by storm.

Agarwal's journey in fashion is truly unconventional. He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in aerospace engineering from Bombay and is a firm believer that his educational background is rarely backed up by work or business. “For general things like consumer business, which have a lot to do with understanding the world, education doesn't play a big role,” he said. “That’s like saying I understand finance better because I graduated in accounting or got an MBA. No, you know more about theory. “Profitability is a very simple formula,” he added.

Mr. Agarwal started his career at Deutsche Bank three years after graduating from university. He used to be an equity derivatives schemer and trader, but when he changed banks in 2015 he thought “I'd like to start something on my own.'' Choosing the luxury fashion market was a decision born out of my personal interest in fashion. He was inspired by a company called LVMH: “They didn't make anything they bought themselves, they expanded it, so with that vision I started Purple Style Lab. ” he said. His big milestone was “purchasing Barney's pop-up shop in February 2018 and growing it approximately 100 times in size over the past six years.” We ended the conversation with a final question: What will the path to profitability look like? “In FI 23, we had a revenue of 372 million, so in 2023, our revenue will cross 500 million,” Agarwal said frankly. This number is only expected to increase further in the coming years.