Rhea and Showik Chakraborty, the founders of fashion brand Chapter2Drip, say that the focus is on building a profitable, community-led brand rather than chasing rapid scale
Rhea Chakraborty and Showik Chakraborty’s streetwear and lifestyle brand Chapter2Drip is aiming to build a Rs 100 crore business over the next two to three years by carving out a space between fast fashion and premium labels. The streetwear and lifestyle brand is betting on a mass-premium positioning, profitable expansion and community-led product development as it scales its retail footprint across India.
In an interview with BW Retail World, Rhea and Showik Chakraborty said the company is on track to open six to seven stores this year and plans to expand into Jaipur, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Surat, Indore and Raipur. While maintaining price parity across channels to avoid brand dilution, the founders said Chapter2Drip is also exploring apparel-adjacent categories, with future expansion guided by consumer demand and community feedback.
For Rhea Chakraborty, building a consumer brand is less about the title of an entrepreneur and more about understanding every aspect of the business. Describing herself as a “shopkeeper” rather than a conventional founder, she said entrepreneurship is “a daily grind” that requires founders to stay closely involved across every function, from design and accounts to logistics, instead of relying entirely on specialists. Edited Excerpts:
Delhi is one of India’s most competitive fashion markets, with high rental costs and intense competition. What specific consumer or market data gave you confidence that Delhi should be your next destination?
Rhea Chakraborty: Shopify gave us the data. It gave us the data that it is one of our top performing cities in India. We also did a lot of pop-ups which is like stall installations in a lot of exhibitions, restaurants, fun events and big festivals and we realised that there is a lot of love for the brand in Delhi. Buyers here not just wear the clothes, they know the collections by name which is why we were very sure that Delhi is a good move. After Mumbai, Delhi is our second largest market so it literally just made sense.
Celebrity-founded brands often enjoy strong initial visibility. As Chapter2Drip grows, what strategies are you adopting to build long-term consumer trust and loyalty based on the brand’s products, philosophy and experience rather than its founders’ influence?
Showik Chakraborty: Yes, the initial boost is pretty much out there that a celebrity-led brand gets, that initial distribution in terms of viewership, but to sustain that over a period of time, the product has to speak for itself. We are focusing and doubling down on the product, quality, pricing. Our entire focus is making sure that instead of it being a brand led by a celebrity, it should be a brand led by people. People in terms of what people are talking about the brand, the consumer feedback that we get.
Why we open these retail outlets is because it is not just a retail outlet, it is an engagement zone with the customer. We have various community-driven events here. This gives us very crucial time as a consumer which normal online direct-to-consumer (D2C) brands do not get. They get written feedbacks over their product but not exactly what the consumer is feeling or thinking. We take that feeling or thinking and put it back into our collections so that what the consumer really wants, which is quite dynamic in nature, can be a little less dynamic in terms of prediction.
You have entered the fashion segment without years of retail experience. For you, what assumptions about building a consumer brand has proved completely wrong?
Rhea Chakraborty: The first big assumption that broke for me was that it is easy. It is not easy at all. Second one was that it is glamorous. It is not a glamorous at all. It is a daily grind being a founder. The word entrepreneur sounds very fancy but essentially you are a shopkeeper. I believe that I am a shopkeeper. I have a shop in Bandra. I have a shop in Colaba and Delhi and my shops need to do well.
The other thing is that I did not realise was that a founder has to understand every single aspect of the business. When you start, you think that you will hire an accounts person for accounts, a designer for design and someone for logistics. But that is not how it works. You need to know everything as much as they do. They will just do their job but you will have to know exactly what is going on in every department. Being an entrepreneur or a founder is being a jack of all trades and master of none.
As you expand the portfolio going ahead, how do you ensure that the brand evolves equally for both men and women?
Rhea Chakraborty: It is pretty much close to 50 per cent. 50 per cent of our consumers are men and 50 per cent are women and that number fluctuates between 55 and 45. It is not really devastatingly different. I do not think that we particularly tried anything when we started it out but what we do from an aesthetic point of view is we design things that both Showik and I would like to wear.
When you have a brother-sister, male and female designing the clothes and implementing them it is very easy because if he is going to wear it and I am going to wear it and we both would equally like to wear it, that makes sense. Surely, certain products and certain colours work better with men and vice versa. When we drop a collection or we drop a SKU, we try to do it in as many colours so that the women colours that are favorite to women are also in it and the men favorites are also in it.
Indian consumers are value-conscious at heart even as premium fashion grows. How do you decide where Chapter2Drip should sit on pricing without diluting either accessibility or brand aspiration?
Showik Chakraborty: Every single fashion D2C founder when they start a business, vendors and manufacturers do not give them that much attention because they already have big clients. So the minimum order quantity (MOQ) is also low, the pricing of unit economics, the price of the COGS becomes much higher. So we have to sell it at a higher price. Luckily for us, we were on ground with these partners of ours and we understood the entire process of building a product which can be worn by everybody.
Sticking to a niche with one target group is what we did not believe in because we were like we would build a brand for everybody to wear every day and feel empowered. That is what gave us the pivot in terms of not charging a t-shirt in street wear for Rs 4,500 to Rs 5,000 and we went to Rs 2,000 because personally, I feel that I do not want to think thrice before wearing this.
We have created a niche for us between a fast fashion brand and a premium brand. The pricing 30 per cent above a fast fashion brand and 30 per cent lower than an extremely premium brand. We are targeting the mass premium audience.
What is the latest update on your expansion roadmap? How are you planning to approach the tier 2,3 markets?
Showik Chakraborty: Around seven months ago, we said that we planned to open ten stores this year. We are on track to open around six to seven. Tier 2 play is purely out of two reasons. Firstly, because the consumer in tier 2 really understands value better than tier 1 in terms of understanding product quality and coming back. The retention at tier 2 is much higher.
Our expansion roadmap includes expansion plans is Jaipur, Gurgaon, Bangalore. We looking at Mumbai for another one and tier 2 in terms of Surat, Indore and Raipur. We do not want to just expand at a speed where operation breaks. We want to double down on each store that we build because we can open how many of the stores we want once the system is right. We are still building, learning and making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. We are trying to build the brand slowly, sustainably and profitably.
Do you see chapter2Drip as an apparel company or a lifestyle brand or a community platform? Are categories beyond clothing also on the horizon?
Rhea Chakraborty: 100 per cent. We have been in development and research for many different categories but we do not want to just expand into categories without being 100 per cent sure of the quality. Whatever we are providing in apparel, if we have to provide something in another category, it has to be worth that quality. We test out categories at store level and we see people’s reactions and then we take a call and we take months and months to create that category. For example, when we started making the t-shirts, we took months to decide the fabric, the kind of dye that goes on it, how good it is, how many washes will it last.
Going forward, we will have to do that. Personally, we are building for community and whatever the community needs or whatever the community wears or drinks or eats, it can it can go to any level. At the moment we are focusing on apparel and we will go to apparel adjacent in the near future. But having said that, it all depends on the community and that it is a two-way street. As much as founders would like to believe that we know what we are building, very often consumers tell you what they want. It is important to hear and we want to remain nimble enough to be open to those ideas and thoughts.
Online fashion has become increasingly promotional, with discounts often driving customer acquisition. How do you plan to scale Chapter2Drip’s online business without getting pulled into a discount-led race that could dilute the brand’s premium positioning?
Showik Chakraborty: This is the question that has been lingering with us for the last couple of months as to when we have marketplaces where distribution is very nice and sorted, these are places that can give you that scale in terms of top line. The bottom line looks weak. That again comes back to our point which says PPP is people, price and product. Our pricing sits well. It is a discount friendly price overall in the fashion space but we are not going towards that route.
It is very easy for any brand out there to get into that non-price parity. Price parity across all our channels is maintained and will be maintained because brand dilution can happen overnight when scale hits. We are very aware in terms of taking those decisions. We also very much believe in brand more than scaling the numbers quickly because bottom line, at the end of the day means, everything. We would rather build a profitable business with lesser numbers than a large scale business with no profit.
As you add the physical stores, how do you expect the online-offline revenue mix to evolve going forward? What is the revenue milestone that you are chasing?
Showik Chakraborty: As we grow, we will obviously grow online as well and followed by offline. Offline is a slower process. We look at online to have 70 per cent of the revenue this year and 30 per cent offline. In the next 18 months, we look at a 60/40 split followed by a 50/50 split.
I feel like Rs 100 crore is the benchmark, then Rs 500 crore and then sky is the limit. We are targeting Rs 100 crore over the next two to three years.
