It was sometime in 2014, and Kavea Chavali was standing in a three-room house in a coastal village eight kilometres from Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, trying to explain why she and her twin sister Ramya wanted to sell only Uppada sarees, online, to people who had never heard of the place. The weaver she was talking to turned to his wife and said, in Telugu, that these two girls had clearly lost their minds.
Kavea did not flinch. “I don’t know how much it matters to you,” she told them. “But I see the potential. I see your hard work.”
It would take years before those words stopped sounding naïve and started sounding prophetic. On April 25, 2026, Kalaneca, the brand the Chavali twins built from that first awkward conversation, was acquired by Shobitam, one of India’s fastest-growing D2C ethnic wear platforms. Within days, sales jumped 5X. The weavers called Ramya. “They said, our looms are not stopping. Thank you,” she told FinancialExpress.com.
For 135 weaver families in Uppada, a village most Indians cannot find on a map, the world had suddenly opened up.
Their mother opened the door. They walked through it.
The Chavali twins did not grow up around looms. They grew up around naval postings, Bombay, Cochin, Vijayawada, following their father’s career. When he retired in 1999, the family moved to Kakinada, a place none of them had heard of.
Eight kilometres away sat Uppada. Their mother, Lata Rao, found it first. She had always worn handlooms, and she began visiting the weavers on her own, sitting with artisan families, learning their craft, designing sarees for herself, occasionally selling a few to relatives. When ministers’ wives visited Kakinada, she would drive them to the village. It was small, personal, and entirely unofficial. A woman who loved a craft and shared it with whoever would listen.
Ramya and Kavea watched all of this. But the moment that changed everything came in 2014, during a visit to Bombay. Their mother mentioned, almost in passing, that she could only ever bring ten, twenty, maybe fifty people to Uppada.
“We said, Mama, it’s time to take the village to the world,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com. “That was our exact line.”
Without our mother, none of this would exist. “The relationship building with the weavers could have happened because of her. They trusted mom since the year 2000, and because of that, they trusted us. If she hadn’t taken us there and spoken to them in pure Telugu, we would just have been outsiders.”
Before the sarees, several other lives
The twins had already packed multiple careers into their twenties. They started as corporate trainers at HCL Technologies, moved to a Bengaluru TV news channel as anchors, and appeared on MTV Connected, a game show for twins. That relocated to Bombay. Ramya joined Reliance Industries to build its learning and development function. Kavea carved out a career as one of India’s most in-demand live events anchors.
Through all of it, as Ramya puts it, one thread held: “We never followed a blueprint. We made our own. Whether it was training, anchoring, or Kalaneca, the foundation has always been the art of self-expression.”
Kalaneca began with Rs 85,000, one loom, and ten sarees. The name fused kala, art, a nod to the sisters’ training in Bharatanatyam and Kuchipudi, with nika, a word a friend suggested that evokes a marriage of forms. There were no investors or even a business background. Just an Instagram post to make people aware that Uppada existed.
The making of a Uppada Jamdani saree
The weavers of Uppada work with mulberry silk, the same grade used in Kanjivaram and Banarasi, sourced from Bangalore. The zari comes from Gujarat. The silk arrives as plain white thread, gets dyed to order, dried along the village road, spun on a charkha, and only then goes on the loom.
The loom is where time becomes visible. A husband and wife sit together for eight hours a day in a house where one of three rooms is given over entirely to a pit loom. No electricity. No machines. Not even jacquard plates for the Jamdani pieces. Everything is done by hand and eye.
A simple Uppada Jamdani, which holds a GI tag registered in 2009 and whose technique dates back to the 18th century, when Bengal’s Jamdani tradition was brought to the weavers of Uppada-Kothapalli, takes fifteen days to complete. A saree with intricate all-over motifs can take six months. One piece, commissioned by a client in the US — eight large peacock motifs worked across the entire fabric — took precisely that long.
The finished saree weighs between 200 and 400 grams, less than most handbags. And here is the detail that rarely gets discussed: the patterns appear identically on both sides of the fabric, making it fully reversible. This is not a design flourish. It is the consequence of a technique so precise it leaves no wrong side.
“Whatever saree you have bought from us,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com, “nobody else will be wearing that.” Every piece is designed by the sisters and woven to order. There is no mass production. There are no repeats.
Why an Uppada is an investment
Kalaneca’s prices start at Rs 6,000 for a plain Uppada. Jamdani pieces begin at Rs 15,000 and climb from there. This is, as Ramya points out, roughly what a single dress from Zara costs.
But the economics behind those prices are tighter than they look. The cost price of a basic Uppada Jamdani runs between Rs 8,000 and Rs 10,000 depending on design, meaning the margin on a piece sold at Rs 15,000 is modest at best. A full all-over Jamdani costs upwards of Rs 22,000 to produce.
When they started, the sisters kept margins deliberately low. So low that Kalaneca was not profitable for years. “Our intention was that everyone should be able to own an Uppada. Did that affect our business? Yes. We were not in profit,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com.
It took two to three years to recalibrate. “We realised that if you can’t keep yourself going, you can’t impact the weavers.”
The pitch she makes now is simple: stop thinking of a saree as occasion wear. An Uppada, stored correctly, aired after wearing, rolled in muslin, never in plastic, can last thirty years and travel to your daughter. “There is a reason a handloom saree is called an heirloom,” Ramya said. “The word is right there.”
The monsoon that nearly ended everything
Ask Ramya when she came closest to giving up, and she does not hesitate. June 2023.
They had committed to an exhibition in Bombay.
The downpour that followed was the kind Bombay delivers without warning. The exhibition was cancelled. The sarees, pure handwoven Uppada and Jamdani pieces representing lakhs in cost price, were destroyed in mud and rain. “You can’t even wear them,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com. “You can only cry.”
One loyal customer, who had crossed the city because the sisters had said they would be there, found them standing in the downpour. He put them in his car and drove them home from Kandivali through a city that had largely stopped moving.
“We were sitting in the back seat, crying. We asked ourselves why we were doing this. What had brought us to this point.”
Ramya was studying for her MBA at ISB at the time. Kavea was juggling her anchoring career. Neither was drawing a salary from Kalaneca. “Weavers ko pay karna tha. Ghar kaise chalta? (The weavers had to be paid. How do you run a house?)” she says simply.
That low point was followed almost immediately by one of their highest, Kala Ghoda Arts Festival 2024, where customers who had never heard of Uppada paid cash without bargaining and asked for more. They made it to the semi-finals of Shark Tank India that same year.
“Every time we wanted to shut, we came back bigger,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com. “We cried a lot, but today, every time we think back, we ask ourselves, how did that even happen?”
Then Shobitam came on board
By 2023, Kalaneca had something no amount of funding could buy: exclusive access to 135 weaver families in a village that most platforms could not even reach. What they did not have was distribution.
Kalaneca’s annual revenue was under Rs 1 crore and Kavea saw the gap.
She had been tracking Shobitam, a sister-led D2C ethnic wear brand founded in the US in 2019, now operating out of Bangalore. Shobitam had clocked Rs 43 crore in annual recurring revenue and grown 12X in the past year. They had Banarasi. They had Kanjivaram. They had south silks. They did not have Uppada.
Kalaneca then became a part of Shobhitam.
“They are not transactional,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com. “They care.”
When the acquisition was formalised on April 25, 2026, the sisters did not take a full cash exit. They chose to retain an equity stake in Shobitam. “We didn’t want to do a hundred per cent exit. We wanted some equity so that it helps us in terms of accountability, and because you stay connected with what you built.”
Within days of the announcement, Kalaneca’s sales jumped 5X, proof that the product-market fit had always been there. It was the pipeline that was missing, not the demand.
What comes next
The sisters are not walking away. They will remain involved in Kalaneca’s storytelling through the end of 2026, designing, weaving, and hosting their Sarees and Sangrias evenings, the community events that became a signature of the brand. The sixth edition, the first with Shobitam, will be in Bangalore.
There is a second venture too, Stage to Success, a communication coaching practice built on their combined two decades in training, anchoring, and journalism.
But Kalaneca is the thing they will be measured by. Not for the revenue. For the looms.
“Beyond passion, the word I would use for what Kavea and I have been is relentless,” Ramya told FinancialExpress.com. “There were people who told us we were doing something wrong. We said, bhadme jaye duniya — we will keep going. And we did.”