I didn't start my career in a boardroom. I started on a factory floor, in a department where every shirt that left the line had to fit one man exactly — not a size, not a range, a single set of measurements taken by hand. That was the world of Made-to-Measure, and it was the first place I learned that a business is really just a collection of systems wearing a company name.
I'd come into that world with a Bachelor's degree in Fashion Technology from NIFT, one of India's most demanding design and technology institutes. NIFT teaches you fabric, pattern, and construction, but the real education starts the day you step onto a production floor and realise that none of that theory survives contact with a deadline. I joined Raymond — a name that, in Indian textiles, carries the same weight that a legacy carmaker carries in Detroit — as a Production Executive. On paper, the job was operations. In practice, it was an apprenticeship in how complexity actually behaves when it's moving at speed.
Learning to see the system, not the shirt
The instinct of a new production executive is to focus on the product — the seam, the collar, the stitch count. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise that the shirt was the least interesting part of the job. The real work was in the system around it: how measurements flowed from a customer's fitting to a cutter's table without distortion, how a delay in one station rippled into a bottleneck two stations later, how you kept quality consistent when every single unit was, by definition, a custom order.
Made-to-Measure has zero tolerance for the kind of variance that mass production can absorb. There's no "good enough" batch to average against — each shirt is judged against one person's body. That constraint turned out to be the best possible training ground. You either build a process precise enough to survive a thousand variations, or you drown in rework. I chose to build the process.
Leadership, I learned, is mostly systems and people — rarely the thing you can point to and call the product.
From executive to Head of Department
Within a relatively short span, I moved from managing a section of the line to leading the entire Made-to-Measure shirting department — a team of roughly 100 people. Among the work that department was responsible for: the official formal wear for the Indian Cricket Team, which is about as unforgiving a client brief as Made-to-Measure gets. There's no room to explain away a fit that's slightly off when the person wearing it is stepping in front of a national audience. That promotion changed the size of the problems I was solving, but not their shape. As HOD, I was now responsible for a large team, tighter delivery windows, and a business unit that had to run profitably while still delivering the individualised precision the product promised.
This is where I built the muscles I still use today: reading a team's real capacity rather than its stated capacity, finding the two or three points in a process where waste quietly accumulates, and making decisions fast enough that the floor never had to wait on me to keep moving. I learned to lead from the front — literally, in the sense that the fastest way to fix a stalled line was often to walk down to it, not to schedule a meeting about it.
What the factory floor actually taught me
It would be easy, in hindsight, to describe those years as "just operations." They were not. They were a compressed course in three things that have shaped every role I've held since:
Precision at scale. Doing something well once is a craft. Doing it well a thousand times, with a thousand different inputs, is an operating system. Made-to-Measure forced me to think in the second register from day one.
Efficiency as respect. Every hour of rework on the floor was an hour taken from someone's time, patience, or livelihood — the machinist's, the customer's, the business's. Cutting inefficiency stopped being an abstract KPI and became something closer to a discipline of respect for everyone downstream of a decision.
Execution over explanation. A factory floor has no patience for a plan that only exists on paper. If it doesn't work when a hundred people are relying on it in real time, it doesn't work. That bias toward execution — build it, run it, fix it live — has stayed with me long after I left textiles.
The pull toward something bigger
By the time I'd spent several years running that department, I'd built something I was proud of: a team that could hit precision targets that most Made-to-Measure operations couldn't touch, and a process that had quietly become a benchmark internally. But I noticed a pattern in myself. I wasn't just managing production anymore — I was drawn to the systems underneath the production: the software that scheduled it, the data that measured it, the decisions that shaped it before a single piece of fabric was cut.
I knew, somewhere in that realisation, that operations alone wouldn't hold my attention forever. I wanted to be closer to the point where a business decides what to build, not just how to build it well. That pull is what eventually took me out of textiles and into product, technology, and — eventually — the work of building businesses from the ground up.
This is the first in a seven-part series tracing the path from a Made-to-Measure shirting line in India to building a business past $1M in revenue in Melbourne.