Buying & Merchandising
Range architecture, assortment planning, pricing, margins, sell-through, replenishment and inventory health.
Textile & Retail Leader · Saree Expert · AI Researcher
Bridging traditional textiles, retail strategy and artificial intelligence.
Across more than three decades in textiles, fashion retail, sourcing, ecommerce, teaching and research, I have worked to turn deep domain knowledge into practical systems, stronger decisions and enduring value.
I build bridges between craft and commerce, heritage and technology, intuition and analytics.
A career across the full textile-to-retail value chain.
I currently head Buying and Merchandising for Avantra and Kalanikethan at Reliance Retail. My journey spans textile manufacturing, teaching, product development, sourcing, ecommerce, entrepreneurship, category management and business analytics.
Domain depth, commercial judgement and analytical thinking.
I work at the intersection of product, consumer, supplier and data.
Sarees & Traditional Textiles
Regional textile identities, construction, motifs, borders, pallus, fabrics, dyeing and craft context.
Sourcing & Vendor Ecosystems
Vendor development, cluster sourcing, negotiation, quality specifications and supplier partnerships.
Retail & Ecommerce Analytics
Customer, conversion, pricing, inventory, returns, search and digital merchandising analysis.
Business Analytics & AI
Python, machine learning, deep learning, forecasting, optimisation and decision systems.
Teaching & Knowledge Sharing
Textile education, professional writing, books, blogs and practical learning resources.
From the loom shed to AI-enabled textile research.
Manufacturing discipline, teaching clarity, sourcing judgement, ecommerce experimentation, retail leadership and data-driven research.
Buying & Merchandising Head, Avantra and Kalanikethan
Leading buying and merchandising across two major saree retail formats.
Category Management, Avantra and Kalanikethan
Private labels, sourcing, portfolio management, inventory and retail analytics.
AJIO / Reliance Ecommerce
Category management and development of the Indie proposition for Indian textile crafts.
Textile manufacturing, education, sourcing and ecommerce
Arvind Mills, textile teaching, Fabindia, Pantaloons, Utsav Fashion and entrepreneurship.
An interdisciplinary foundation.
My education brings together textiles, fashion management, computing and business analytics—the four disciplines that shape my professional and research approach.
Business Analytics and Intelligence
Executive Programme, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore
Master of Fashion Management
National Institute of Fashion Technology, New Delhi
Master of Computer Applications
Guru Jambheshwar University, Hisar
B.Tech. in Textile Technology
Technological Institute of Textiles, Bhiwani
AI for the recognition of Indian saree heritage.
My part-time doctoral research at CHRIST University examines how visual AI and graph-based reasoning can identify regional saree provenance.
AI-driven saree origin identification
My work combines deep visual models, textile-domain knowledge and relational learning for reliable and explainable classification.
21 clustersSaree traditions in the benchmark dataset
12,436 imagesCurated with group-aware splitting
CNN · ViT · GNNVisual and graph-based directions
Cases, publications and professional writing.
My work combines applied business analytics with textile-domain knowledge and practical resources for learners and professionals.
Harvard Business Publishing Teaching Case
Champo Carpets: Improving Business-to-Business Sales Using Machine Learning Algorithms
The case examines how machine-learning models can improve customer targeting, sample selection and B2B sales effectiveness in a heritage carpet enterprise.
View the official case →Indian Saris
A practical reference on Indian saree traditions and merchandising.
Fabric Structure
Core concepts in fabric construction for students and professionals.
Why Turquoise Bleeds?
Essential dyeing knowledge for merchandisers and textile learners.
Let’s connect across textiles, retail, analytics and research.
I welcome professional and academic conversations relating to textile knowledge, buying and merchandising, retail strategy, analytics and AI.