Every day, whether in the newspaper or online, we come across names who have proven their mettle in their respective fields and touched upon new heights of success with their unstoppable tenacity and passion for opening up new possibilities. But while celebrating the wonderful impact they make on the world, we often neglect to delve into the circumstances that could have inspired them to come up with a novel concept. Make It Possible Talks features Indian achievers who take the stage and discuss how they got to where they are today and the experiences that paved the way. But when we say it’s more than that, we mean it in the sense that, from this platform, we discuss the opportunities these people opened up for themselves when all the doors were shut against them. We strongly feel that there must have been countless tales of sleepless nights and arduous labour before they were lucky enough to experience sweet success. Tales for everyone to hear, be inspired by and possibly apply to their lives.
Meet Our Guests
This time we have on our stage a power couple, Mrs. Kirti Poonia and Prateek Gupte, founders of Relove. By fusing technology and sustainability with fashion, they have reinvented what it means to be consciously fashionable. Relove is a technology firm that wants to revolutionise India’s circular fashion market by letting users resell garments on brand websites.
“Fashion has been a sort of internal calling.”
“Fashion has been a sort of internal calling”, revealed Poonia, and it has been on her mind ever since she was little. In her formative years, Kirti was a fashion enthusiast under the influence of her mother, a fashion designer. Still, like any other good Indian child, she went on to become an engineer. After several years of serving as a techie at a reputable company, Kirti was exposed to raw art and culture through the Tata Administrative Services- Okhai Programme. Okhai was founded as a project to create employment opportunities for rural women artisans through training, understanding customer needs, manufacturing and retailing apparel and home décor products, and offering best-in-class quality and service. After enabling several women craftsmen with a respectable wage and enhancing their voice in the family through Okhai, Kirti Poonia moved on to start her new business, Relove.
Kirti co-found Relove in 2021 with Prateek Gupte (her spouse). Prateek is a techie who is fascinated by possibilities of solving complex problems using innovation and technology. Together this couple decided to start this new venture.
The idea of Relove was born out of a greater collective need to bring culture of sustainable fashion to the fore.
When asked about the idea of building a technology that offers a reselling platform for different clothing brands, helping them run their own thrift shop, the duo went on to explain the deep-rooted discrepancy in consumption habits in the clothing sector. It is estimated that only 80 billion of the 150 billion clothing items manufactured are sold. Approximately 400 billion are discarded every year, while 9 billion are left unused in people’s closets. Every purchase of a preowned cloth saves the process of a brand new garment being produced, which can reduce the overall waste of clothing by 80%.
Did you know that owning a pre-loved item may save CO2 emissions by six times the weight of the item?
These are just a few of the intriguing revelations we had while speaking with this amazing pair and discovering much more about sustainable fashion.
Want to know more such interesting trivia about the fashion and apparel industry? Visit our YouTube channel to watch the complete episode.
Before we wind up…
Fuelled by Yes is a simple yet powerful idea that you can achieve anything in life if you are fuelled by the spirit of YES. To believe in yourself and pursue what you thought was unachievable. Yes to an infinite you!
Fuelled by Yes foundation by Repos Energy is dedicated to bringing out this message to the world and inspire the next generation of change-makers.