PETALING JAYA, Oct 22 — There was no business plan. There were no industry contacts and no family trade to inherit. The only capital was what three sisters had personally saved.
When Suvitha Rajasingam and Jeevitha Rajasingam registered Pattushastra on August 23, 2012, with their elder sister Kavitha Rajasingam behind them, they were, by their own account, simply three sisters from Sentul who had grown frustrated trying to buy a decent saree.
“We are sisters from Sentul — born and bred there — with absolutely no connection to the textile industry and no family background in business,” Jeevitha said.
Their father was a consultant for roadworks; their mother was a homemaker.
“Every part of Pattushastra — from its identity and collections to its relationships with weavers and clients • was imagined, learned and built by us from scratch, one step at a time.”
Today, Suvitha and Jeevitha run the business day to day.
The problem that started it
The idea did not begin as a business idea at all. It began as consumer frustration.
While preparing for Kavitha’s wedding, the sisters found it near impossible to source authentic, reasonably priced Kanjivaram silk sarees. Their search eventually took them across the border to Singapore, where they hit the same wall.
“When we were shopping for our elder sister’s wedding, we just couldn’t find genuine Kanjivaram sarees at a fair price — not here, and not even in Singapore,” Suvitha said.
“Being raised in a middle-income family should never mean compromising on quality.”
That conviction, that genuine craftsmanship shouldn’t be gatekept by price, became in effect the company’s founding thesis.
There was no seed funding, no shop lot and no storefront to start.
“We could not afford a shop, so Pattushastra began from home,” Jeevitha says.
For more than a year, the sisters ran the business entirely out of their house. They secured their first rented shop lot in 2014, two years after registration.
The next leap came in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, when the sisters decided to move into a space of their own: what they now call their Pattushastra boutique in Seksyen 11, Petaling Jaya.
It was a significant bet to make during one of the most volatile periods for retail in recent memory.
But it reflected a business built on long-term conviction rather than short-term timing.
What makes Pattushastra’s trajectory notable isn’t just the bootstrapped origin story. It’s what the sisters chose not to do along the way.
By their own admission, there were moments when following the wider market, with cheaper, faster, mass-produced sarees, would have been the easier commercial path.
“We even tried to follow the direction of the market,” Suvitha said.
“But we gave up, because we simply could not do it.”
Instead, the business scaled by going deeper rather than wider. It built direct relationships with three master weavers who each oversee 50 to 80 looms for Kanjivaram silk, alongside weaving units in West Bengal and Varanasi for its broader artisan collections.
One of its West Bengal partners is an NGO in Calcutta that trains and employs women from underprivileged backgrounds.
The relationship doubles as social impact, though the sisters rarely frame it in those terms themselves.
Fourteen years on, the numbers the sisters are willing to put on the business remain deliberately vague.
They say they’ve never tracked total sales, though they estimate the figure at “thousands” of sarees.
What has scaled more visibly is the customer base itself. It began as a niche, local Indian clientele and now reaches Malay and Chinese customers domestically, as well as buyers as far afield as Singapore, Australia and Canada.
The age range has widened too, from senior citizens to Gen Z. That is an unusual spread for a heritage retail category typically assumed to skew narrowly toward a single generation.
Looking ahead, the sisters describe ambitions that sound less like a retail expansion plan and more like a positioning goal.
They want Pattushastra to be the name the market defaults to for significant occasions, and eventually, to take that positioning global.
“We aspire to take Pattushastra into the global market, carrying our artisans’ stories with us,” Jeevitha said.
The business started with three sisters, no capital and no industry playbook. Its horizon now is considerably longer than the one they set out with in 2012, and they are building it, as they tell it, one relationship and one saree at a time.
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