When Sani was first founded, Niki was pursuing a career in consulting and venture capital while Ritika was still in high school, making the decision to colead a fashion company unprecedented. "We've officially launched South Asian fashion for the first time at Nordstrom," Ritika says. This April, they hit another major milestone. In 2020, Sani became the first South Asian brand to appear on Rent the Runway and sold out in just 48 hours. ![]() "There's so much about that has been taken away and removed from its context, and we want to bring that context back into the clothing," Ritika says. "It was a community interested in the culture as whole." In growing their following on TikTok, the Shamdasani sisters, now known as the Sani sisters, hope to turn conversations about appropriating culture into conversations about appreciating culture. "What we found on TikTok was not just an Indian American community," Ritika says. On the platform, the sisters maintain a dedicated fan base that has made their business "100 times stronger than before" and influenced the way they evolve their company. They've seen their biggest success on TikTok. "For us, it just made so much sense to start off in this category, bring everyone into the culture in a way that hadn't been done before, in a way that felt accessible and approachable," Niki says. Inspired by their personal dilemma, the sisters created a line of wedding-specific formalwear. It wasn't until a family wedding sent them searching for traditional South Asian wedding guest outfits that they realized the importance of making South Asian clothing available to Western consumers. ![]() ![]() Growing up in their small, predominately white hometown, the Shamdasani sisters felt out of place. "We didn't have a huge community of Indian Americans or South Asian Americans," Niki tells POPSUGAR of being born and raised in Fayetteville, NC, after their parents emigrated from India. It was a community interested in the culture as whole." "What we found on TikTok was not just an Indian American community.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |