Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Hindustan Times (Lucknow) - Live
‘Lucknow’s fashion market is waiting to be explored’
Self-taught designer Shilpa Shanker Narain is going places with her unique collection of hand bags and wallets. The designer feels that the Lucknow market is yet to grow and is waiting to be explored as the locals here have just begin to understand the fashion outlook like connoisseurs from other metro cities.
The young designer has a Lucknow connect and feels proud to be associated with the city of Nawabs, “I am married to Ashish Narain, who happens to be the son of Yogendra Narain, former secretarygeneral of Rajya Sabha and exchief secretary UP. So I keep on coming back to the city. Though I am based in Delhi but work makes me travel a lot.”
“Currently, I am all set to bring my new collection to Lucknow and other parts of UP. It is actually designed keeping in mind the temperament and requirement of the state,” says Shilpa, who started off with designing book covers.
“Later I tried hands on product designing and home decor stuff. The phase was exciting and I was getting quite good offers for almost eight years. It was after that I decided to switch to bags because whatever was available in market disappointed me as a buyer,” says the designer who has also introduced western contemporary bags in local market.
Shilpa has launched the brand Terracorda which boasts of exquisite collection of bags based on alternate leather. “You can say that they are vegan bags as they are PETA approved,” says the girl who is now into quality bag designing for more than two years.
“I have small unit with fourfive workers and so I just come with 60 products of each design. Thankfully, the collections are a sold out as soon as they are out and so I have decided to come up with two to three collections a year now. I also have a retail counter in Delhi and Bangalore but otherwise it is available online,” she says.