Hidden Gems: Meet Niki Shamdasani of Sani

Today we’d like to introduce you to Niki Shamdasani.

Hi Niki, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My younger sister Ritika and I started Sani in 2017 because we wanted to find South Asian clothing that felt more like…us. First generation South Asian Americans that loved comfort, silhouettes that could be taken from an Indian event to our everyday wardrobe, and a shopping experience that felt like shopping with a friend (instead of an Indian uncle).

For us that started with formalwear. We focused on learning how to best serve our customers from our community first. So we did pop-ups and fashion shows (including a fashion show in Raleigh in September 2018 that attracted over 300 guests!) along the East Coast. We got to know the local startup scene, including through NCIDEA, UNC-Chapel Hill, and NC State.

In February 2020, we launched on Rent the Runway as the first South Asian fashion brand on the platform. The pieces were booked out within a few days, we were seeing unprecedented sales and traffic directly to our website, and major new partnership opportunities came our way. About 2.5 weeks later, the world shut down due to the pandemic.

As a formalwear focused company, both our customers (people going to events) and our suppliers (all in India) went away. We spent our time improving our customer experience online, growing our community on TikTok (with a family of 120,000 and growing!), and expanding to new categories. We had always kept an eye on what it meant to show multiple parts of ourselves in every facet of our lives. Now we have loungewear, bomber jackets, dresses, and more on the way. They all continue to incorporate uniquely South Asian textures, embroideries, and colors.

Today we’re continuing to build the first mainstream fashion brand with South Asian culture at its core.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve learned obstacles and challenges are inherent in running a business. The pandemic has been the greatest struggle since our business went from major growth mode down to 0 because of it. We’ve rebounded from that now after a lot of lessons learned. Another memorable challenge was when we were working on fulfilling our biggest order yet. I had gone to oversee the start of production in India and it looked like things would go smoothly. About a month later, I received a picture of the first few pieces and the colors had been mixed up. I flew to India the next day. It was all eventually sorted, although with more stress than I had ever experienced with Sani to that point. Sometime after that, we were waiting for the shipment to arrive in the US. We had to turn the shipment around to the buyer the same day it arrived so things were on a tight schedule. And on the day of we learned that FedEx had lost our shipment. We went to the FedEx distribution center and after a lot of pleading, a few of the wonderful employees there searched all over and found our package. We got the shipment out on time, but we learned to build in more buffer time! We try to view the struggles as opportunities to learn and grow (although easier said than done). If it’s meant to be, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

We’re always looking for the lessons that can be learned in any situation, including tragic ones like the Covid-19 crisis. Are there any lessons you’ve learned that you can share?
We’ve learned many lessons from the Covid-19 crisis, but one of the most important ones was to stay true to the company we want to build. Pre-pandemic, we had started to get really caught up in what our competition was doing. So much so that it was probably affecting what we were choosing to do. During the pandemic, when all bets were off, we stopped thinking about others and only thought about how to keep our business going. That led to a lot of success on TikTok and new products, neither of which would have happened if we had still been looking at the competition.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://sanidesigns.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sani/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sanidesigns/
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@sanisisters

Image Credits
For both pictures of me and my sister, credit goes to Justin Eisner. For the pictures of the formalwear and loungewear, credit goes to Pavithra Ramasubramanian. For the fabric picture, credit goes to Nikita Shamdasani.