“At heart, I am a curator. Whether I am discovering an emerging designer, building a luxury tea brand, styling a bride, or preserving a family legacy, my work always begins with one question: How do we recognise excellence, create lasting value, and leave an industry stronger than we found it? That has become both my pursuit and my purpose.”
Tavishi Kanoria is an entrepreneur, fashion curator, artist, and social entrepreneur from Kolkata. Across every venture she has built, one philosophy has remained constant: identifying exceptional craftsmanship, nurturing creative talent, and creating institutions that celebrate Indian excellence with authenticity and purpose.
While her work today spans luxury fashion, heritage tea, branding, and experiential retail, she does not see these as separate industries. They are different expressions of the same belief—that enduring brands are built by recognising mastery, preserving craftsmanship, and earning trust over time.
The Artist Before the Entrepreneur
Long before she entered business, Tavishi developed an artistic eye through years of training in Odissi classical dance and a parallel career as a professional artist, completing more than 100 commissioned paintings. Those creative disciplines shaped her understanding of proportion, storytelling, craftsmanship, and detail—qualities that would later define her approach to curation.
A magna cum laude graduate in Entrepreneurship from Babson College, Massachusetts, Tavishi combines analytical business thinking with creative intuition. Babson taught her how to identify opportunities and build sustainable businesses, while the arts taught her how to recognise excellence.
Building Citrine
After returning to Kolkata from Babson College, Tavishi recognised a significant gap in the city’s luxury fashion landscape. Women seeking contemporary Indian designer wear often had to travel to Delhi or Mumbai to access thoughtfully curated collections.
Inspired by her mother’s experience as a discerning shopper and encouraged by her father’s entrepreneurial vision, she founded Citrine – The Multi Designer Store in 2015.
From the very beginning, the vision was never to become the largest multi-designer retailer. Instead, it was to become the most thoughtfully curated.
Every designer is evaluated not only for creativity but also for craftsmanship, originality, commercial relevance, reliability, and the ability to offer something genuinely distinctive. Each year, Tavishi personally reviews thousands of garments and collections, selecting only a small percentage that ultimately becomes part of Citrine’s carefully curated edit.
A Founder-Led Philosophy
What distinguishes Citrine is its deeply personal, founder-led approach.
Since day one, Tavishi and her mother have built the business through complementary strengths. Her mother brings decades of intuitive understanding of customers, relationships, and personalised styling, while Tavishi leads merchandising, trend forecasting, commercial curation, and brand building.
Together, they have created more than a luxury retail destination—they have built a business rooted in trust.
The team invests time in understanding every client’s personality, lifestyle, body type, occasion, and wardrobe needs, believing that true luxury lies in thoughtful guidance rather than endless choice.
Beyond Retail
Over the past decade, Citrine has become one of Eastern India’s most respected curator-led luxury fashion destinations.
The platform has introduced numerous emerging Indian designers to the Eastern market long before they became nationally recognised names, while continuing to showcase many of India’s most celebrated design houses. Many of these designers remain long-term partners of Citrine, reflecting relationships built on mutual trust rather than transactions.
Today, clients travel from across Eastern India, Bangladesh, tier-two cities, and overseas to experience Citrine’s highly personalised approach to luxury fashion. Its recognition as Vogue Wedding’s Kolkata retail partner further reinforced its position within India’s luxury bridal landscape.
Extending the Philosophy to Tea
The same philosophy naturally extends into Tavishi’s work with Goomtee Tea Estate and Balaji Agro International, where she is helping shape the consumer-facing future of one of India’s historic tea estates through luxury branding, premium retail, and tea tourism.
Although fashion and tea may appear unrelated, Tavishi approaches both through the same lens: recognising craftsmanship, honouring heritage, and building brands with authenticity rather than marketing alone.
Reflecting on the influence of her father, whose life and work have been deeply rooted in the tea industry, she says:
“My father has spent decades building an extraordinary depth of knowledge in tea—particularly in blending, quality, and the discipline required to maintain consistency year after year. I have grown up watching the seriousness, patience, and integrity with which he approaches his craft and his business. Working alongside him has been both a privilege and an education. He has taught me that true luxury cannot be manufactured through marketing; it has to be earned through knowledge, discipline, quality, and years of uncompromising commitment.”
For Tavishi, her work in tea is therefore not simply an expansion into another industry. It is also an opportunity to learn from, preserve, and carry forward a family legacy built over generations while reinterpreting it for a contemporary global consumer.
Challenges
Building a founder-led luxury business has required continually adapting to an evolving marketplace.
When Citrine opened in 2015, curated multi-designer retail was still relatively uncommon in Kolkata. Over the years, national retail expansion, digital commerce, changing consumer behaviour, and direct-to-consumer designer brands transformed the competitive landscape.
Rather than competing on scale, Tavishi chose to deepen Citrine’s strengths—curation, personal relationships, trust, and exceptional service.
At the same time, she has embraced the opportunity to modernise the consumer-facing side of Goomtee Tea Estate, helping position Indian luxury tea for a new generation of global consumers.
Recognition
One of Tavishi’s greatest achievements has been building Citrine into one of Eastern India’s most respected curator-led luxury fashion destinations.
The platform has helped numerous designers establish visibility and loyal clientele while creating one of the region’s most trusted destinations for occasion wear, bridal fashion, and luxury prêt.
Personally, Tavishi graduated magna cum laude from Babson College and has been recognised with honours including the Times Power Women Award, the Femina Achievers East Award, and the HOPE Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship.
Yet she considers her greatest achievement to be creating opportunities—for designers, artisans, heritage businesses, and creative communities to flourish together.
Looking Ahead
Tavishi’s long-term vision is centred on building institutions rather than simply growing businesses.
For Citrine, this means creating a world-class, founder-led digital platform that recreates the personalised luxury shopping experience online while making carefully curated Indian designer fashion accessible to customers far beyond Kolkata.
For Goomtee Tea Estate, it means transforming one of India’s historic tea estates into a globally recognised luxury tea brand while developing its heritage property into an immersive destination where visitors experience the complete journey of tea—from the gardens and factories to the history, craftsmanship, culture, and people behind every cup.
Reflecting on her vision, she says:
“I do not aspire to build the biggest businesses. I aspire to build businesses that become institutions—brands respected not only for commercial success, but for integrity, craftsmanship, authenticity, and the value they create for future generations.”
Final Thought
The strongest thread running through Tavishi’s story is not fashion or tea. It is curation.
Every major milestone reinforces that single idea:
Tavishi Kanoria is a curator who builds institutions around Indian excellence.
