Riyana Chikankala: The Trust Business

Sunita Singh spent years as a homemaker before starting a Chikankari label in Noida. Twenty months on, she has built it without leaning on paid advertising.

Building an identity of her own

Sunita Singh spent years with her days shaped entirely by her household. She was a homemaker raising two daughters, and she writes that after years of putting her family first, she wanted to build an identity of her own, something with a purpose beyond just being a business.

In December 2024 that became Riyana Chikankala, a handcrafted Chikankari label operating out of Noida and named after her daughters. The registered entity behind it, Rupesh Singh & Daughters LLP, keeps the same reference. The craft is Lucknowi, and Sunita describes the brand as rooted in authentic Lucknowi craftsmanship, making pieces meant to hold up across generations rather than seasons.

When strangers started coming back

The shift from idea to business arrived without a single dramatic moment. It came when people outside her own circle started responding, she writes: asking questions, buying, and then coming back. The returning customer was the signal. It told her the work had value to people who had no reason to be kind about it.

Today the team is two. Sunita and her husband run everything between them, with no freelancers on the roster.

The brand reports having served more than 250 customers since launch. Online sales carry the regular business while exhibitions open a second, offline channel, and she reports steady organic growth across both, tracking orders and revenue on each.

Growing without an advertising budget

What is missing from that picture is an advertising line. Sunita writes that the decision most people in her position would have made differently was hers to stop waiting for the right budget. Instead of depending heavily on paid campaigns, she built visibility through consistent content, exhibition floors, customer relationships, word of mouth and community. "I believe you don't have to wait until you have more resources to start growing," she writes. "You have to learn how to grow with what you have."

The inventory lesson

The first year taught her a harder lesson about money. In Chikankari, variety is not optional, because a customer may connect with any one of a hundred designs. But buying deep into every design and category locks up capital. She learned to keep enough range to give customers a real choice, watch what they genuinely responded to, and only then invest behind it. Her advice to other founders is direct: do not confuse more inventory with a stronger business.

What nobody sees

Ask her what outsiders miss and she does not point at long hours. She writes that the least visible part of the work is how personal every decision becomes when the business is yours. A customer sees a product and a price. She sees the inventory call behind it, the guess about what people will prefer, the experiment she can afford and the one she cannot. There is rarely a clean right answer. You decide with what you know, live with the outcome, and learn from it.

That shapes how she reads her own customers. They may think they are buying a Chikankari outfit, she writes, but what they are actually buying is trust: that the fabric is right, that the craftsmanship justifies the price, and that the piece is something they will keep wearing rather than wear once. The product is only one part of the purchase. The rest is the confidence that somebody thought carefully before putting it on sale.

Playing for the second purchase

The next six months are pointed at retention rather than reach. Sunita wants to use the customer data the brand has already built to read buying patterns and previous purchases, and to design a repeat-customer approach around them instead of chasing new buyers every month. Alongside that, she plans to strengthen Riyana's online presence, improve the customer experience, and expand only the categories that real demand supports.

Three years out, her definition of success is not a revenue figure. She would call Riyana successful if it has become a brand people remember, recommend and return to, with a base of loyal customers and enough team and systems that the business no longer runs through her for every decision. She also wants it to stay what it started as: a slow-fashion, family-focused label with an identity of its own.

For a brand named after her daughters, built by someone who spent years being everyone else's first priority, that last part may be the whole point.

Key Takeaways

• Sunita Singh launched Riyana Chikankala in Noida in December 2024 after years as a homemaker, naming the brand after her two daughters.

• The team is two people, Sunita and her husband, with no freelancers. The brand reports serving over 250 customers so far.

• Growth has come from content, exhibitions, word of mouth and community rather than paid advertising, a deliberate choice made instead of waiting for a bigger budget.

• Her hardest first-year lesson was financial discipline around inventory: keep enough variety for customers to choose from, but let demand decide where the money goes deep.

• The next six months are aimed at retention, using existing customer data to build repeat business rather than chasing new buyers.
  

  

  ~Editor Shobhit Mehandiratta