“Experience matters more than transaction. The real opportunity lies in creating value and emotion, not simply selling a product.”
Shivika Goenka, Director of Luxury & Education at the RP Sanjiv Goenka Group, represents a new generation of business leaders shaping premium Indian consumer brands with equal parts creativity and commercial discipline. Her work spans retail, luxury, education and lifestyle, with a consistent focus on building ventures that are design-led, insight-driven and built for long-term relevance. She is also on the Board of Teach For India, Kolkata, a member of the CII Schools Forum, and part of the Young Presidents’ Organization.
Over the last few years, Shivika has quietly built a distinctive portfolio. From The Gift Studio, a premium gifting platform reimagining the category through design and personalisation, to RP Goenka International School, a future-facing institution designed around global exposure and holistic learning, to her role in shaping the Group’s larger luxury and retail play through Quest Mall and the partnership with Falguni Shane Peacock, her work reflects a clear thesis: Indian consumers increasingly seek experiences, not just products.
That belief sits at the heart of everything she builds. At Quest, it means understanding the evolution of aspirational consumption and helping shape a premium retail environment for an increasingly discerning customer. In Falguni Shane Peacock, it means backing Indian creative talent with the structure and scale needed to grow globally. In The Gift Studio, it means transforming gifting from a transactional category into a thoughtful, design-led experience.
Identifying the gap
For Shivika, The Gift Studio emerged from observing a white space in India’s premium gifting market. While gifting is one of the most emotionally significant forms of consumption, the category itself remained fragmented and functional, with limited attention to design, curation or elevated customer experience.
As she watched consumer behaviour evolve across the Group’s retail environments, including Quest Mall and Nature’s Basket, she noticed a larger shift underway. Customers were moving away from one-size-fits-all purchases and towards more considered, experience-led consumption. That insight became the foundation for a platform that combines digital ease with creative curation, designer collaborations, personalisation and immersive physical retail.
The result is a business that does more than sell gifts. It seeks to elevate the meaning of gifting itself, making the experience feel as thoughtful as the emotion behind it. That positioning has helped The Gift Studio carve a niche in a category that was traditionally seen as occasional and utility-led.
A differentiated model
What sets The Gift Studio apart is that it was not conceived as a standard e-commerce platform or a festive hampers business. Instead, it has been built as an experience-first gifting ecosystem, where design, storytelling and customisation are as important as convenience.
Its edge lies in combining technology with human curation. The business uses digital tools to enable personalisation and scale, but retains a strong editorial lens in how products are selected, collaborations are built and physical spaces are designed. This allows the brand to remain premium and emotionally resonant, while still being operationally robust.
For Shivika, this balance between creativity and systems is critical. She has consistently argued that design alone is not enough; it must be supported by process, precision and repeatability if it is to become a real business. That mindset has shaped not only The Gift Studio, but her broader approach to premium and luxury retail.
Building with consumer insight
One of the biggest challenges in building an experience-led business is preserving the human touch while scaling. For The Gift Studio, that meant finding a way to systemise personalisation without making it feel impersonal, and to create immersive offline experiences without losing efficiency.
That challenge became an opportunity. By closely tracking how consumer preferences were shifting, especially among younger and more design-conscious audiences, Shivika and her team began to identify patterns. There was rising interest in curated and design-forward products, more frequent gifting beyond traditional occasions, and stronger demand for artisanal, lifestyle-led and meaningful purchases.
These insights have informed everything from product development to collaborations to retail format. They have also reinforced Shivika’s conviction that brands in the premium space must be built around deep consumer understanding, not superficial trend-following.
Defining success differently
For Shivika, success has never been measured by revenue alone. While scale and profitability are important, she places equal weight on customer engagement, repeat behaviour, brand love and emotional resonance.
Under her leadership, The Gift Studio has grown into one of India’s early integrated premium gifting platforms, with a presence across digital, e-commerce and quick commerce channels, while continuing to strengthen its physical footprint. The business is now targeting significant growth over the next few years, with a clear ambition to build a much larger national platform.
More importantly, it has become proof of a broader idea: that Indian consumers are willing to pay for experiences that feel curated, credible and emotionally intelligent. In that sense, the venture is not just a business success, but a validation of Shivika’s larger approach to building brands.
The road ahead
Looking ahead, Shivika’s ambition is not limited to scaling individual ventures. Her larger vision is to build a connected luxury and lifestyle ecosystem where retail, digital experiences, education, design and creative partnerships reinforce one another.
For The Gift Studio, that means expanding experiential retail into more cities, deepening collaborations, and investing further in technology-enabled personalisation. For the broader portfolio, it means continuing to back Indian creativity and premium consumption with institutional structure, long-term thinking and strategic patience.
This is what makes Shivika Goenka stand out. She is not simply building businesses; she is building platforms around changing Indian aspiration. Her work reflects an understanding that the future of premium consumption lies not in excess, but in thoughtful experiences, emotional relevance and brands that know how to marry creativity with execution.
Wisdom earned
Among the most important lessons she has learned is that meaningful businesses are rarely built in haste. They require patience, clarity of purpose and the discipline to execute consistently. They also require a deep understanding of the consumer, because insight remains the foundation of differentiated innovation.
That philosophy continues to shape Shivika’s journey. Whether through gifting, education, luxury retail or design-led partnerships, she is helping define a more contemporary Indian business story, one where aspiration is matched by substance, and creativity is matched by systems.
