Almost every girl dreams of wearing a Sabyasachi outfit!

Back in 2012, Oprah Winfrey visited Sabyasachi store in Mumbai, ignoring all other designers. Carving a niche for himself in a world of fashion, Sabyasachi Mukherjee is one of the Associate Designer Members of Fashion Design Council of India and the youngest board member of the National Museum of Indian Cinema. Sabyasachi, which started off as a local fashion label in 1999 with a workforce of three people, is today a renowned name in the fashion industry. Sabyasachi is the only Indian designer to be invited to showcase his label at the Milan Fashion Week 2004. When one thinks Sabyasachi, one thinks sarees. As of now, the brand has flagship stores located in Kolkata, New Delhi, Mumbai and Hyderabad. Limited pieces are also showcased by other retailers in various parts of India, as well as select international retailers in California, Atlanta, London and Dubai.

The journey of Sabyasachi Mukherjee so far!

Since the very beginning of his childhood, Mukherjee had a keen interest in handicrafts and craftsmanship. He was born in a middle class Bengali family. His mother was a professor in a Government College and his father had an average job. Growing up he always took the famous designer Rohit Khosla as an inspiration. At the age of 15, Sabyasachi decided to express his interest in fashion. However, at the same time his father lost his job. His parents refused to support him in his decision and they had no financial sources to pay for his further studies.

He ran away from home and worked as a waiter in Goa for a short period as his parents refused to give him the money for his NIFT exam. Being determined about his passion, Sabyasachi then sold all his books and solely paid for his education through relentless hard work. After graduating from NIFT in 1999, he decided to come up with his own label with a Rs. 20,000 borrowed from his sister. The store started off with only three employees at hand. He used to fix beds in the workshop and made his work his life. He would work on his designs through the night sometimes and this trend continued relentlessly for about five years. Sabyasachi debuted at the Indian Fashion Week in 2002. The Women’s Wear Daily praised and proclaimed him as the future of Indian Fashion and this encouraged him further to follow his dreams. Going forward, he made his first international runway debut in 2003 with the Grand Winner Award at the Mercedes Benz New Asia Fashion week in Singapore. The man was receiving immense praise from everyone and this was just the beginning. Sabyasachi went on to represent his label in several fashion events and 2006 was the turning point of his career. He was asked to showcase his collection The Nair Sisters at the prestigious Oxford University annual black tie charity dinner fashion show. That is when he grabbed everyone’s attention and people across the globe started recognising him. He represented his exquisite range of designs at the New York Fashion Week, London Fashion Week, Bridal Asia, Kuala Lumpur Fashion Week, Miami Fashion Week and the list goes on. Sabyasachi definitely knows the art of making an outfit look striking and phenomenal. In the year 2012, the designer styled a calendar for which Bollywood actress Neha Dhupia dressed up as famous painter Frida Kahlo who has been the designer’s inspiration. Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s Autumn Winter 2015 collection at Amazon India Couture Week (AICW) was a collaboration with French luxury footwear and fashion designer Christian Louboutin.

Apart from his national and international ventures, Sabyasachi works for a cause as well. He started a project called Save the Saree, where he retails hand woven Indian sarees on a nonprofit basis priced at Rs. 3500 and the entire proceed goes to the weavers of Murshidabad.This initiative is also strongly supported by Bollywood divas like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Vidya Balan.

He made his fashion label Sabyasachi’s debut in the film industry with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film Black for which he won the National Award in 2005 for the Best Costume Designer for a feature film. Impressed by his incredible designs, many Bollywood films featured Sabyasachi’s label in their films including Baabul, Laaga Chunari Mein Daag, Raavan, Guzaarish, Paa, No One Killed Jessica and English Vinglish.

Recently, Anushka Sharma wore a pale pink lehenga and Virat Kohli wore an ivory raw silk sherwani designed by Sabyasachi at their not so high profile wedding.

Apart from these celebrities, Sabyasachi’s clienteles include  Samantha Akkineni, Aliaa Bhatt, Rani Mukerji, Sridevi, Tabu, Shabana Azmi, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Deepika Padukone, Shraddha Kapoor, Sushmita Sen and Kareena Kapoor Khan and several other actors.

Apart from our national beauties, International actresses who opted for Sabyasachi are Renée Zellweger and Reese Witherspoon.

For the last 15 years, Sabyasachi Mukherjee has pioneered the use of Indian handlooms in his designs. His iconic Khadi, cotton and silk handcrafted outfits have won the hearts of people from all over the world.

Explore. Post. Share. Repeat.

One of the most remarkable microblogging websites that is always open in one of our tabs is Tumblr. You can explore, post, blog and repeat, with its amazing layout and features this website has all of us hooked to it!

Here’s how the idea of Tumblr came to life!

The inception of Tumblr took place in the year 2007 when the founder of tumblr David Karp, was on an internship programme at the same place where Tumblr is headquartered at, New york.  Karp was always interested in tumblelogs (short form blogs). He was waiting for the right time to make it happen and establish a blogging platform to introduce his own tumblelogging platform. As no one had done so after a year of waiting, Karp along with the developer Marco Arment started working on their own tumblelogging platform. After loads of research and hard work, the website was finally under progress. In the initial days of 2007, Marcel Molina who was a consultant received a message from Karp out of nowhere. Karp was living in New York and he had seen Molina’s website Projectionist and used it as inspiration to create a new site he was launching with his friend Marco Arment. It was called Tumblr. Tumblr took the best of what Projectionist and another similar website Anarchaia had to offer, Karp combined the two in one platform. Tumblr was finally launched in February 2007. In no time two weeks after the launch, the platform had gained 75,000 users. How amusing! Arment left the company in September 2010 to focus on Instapaper. This media network is powered by an army of independent creators and is the home to an audience of more than 400 million unique visitors. 

By the end of 2011, Tumblr received an enormous $ 125 millions of funding from several investors including Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, Martín Varsavsky, John Borthwick (Betaworks), Fred Seibert, Krum Capital and Sequoia Capital. In early 2012, Tumblr featured its first major brand advertising campaign in conjunction with Adidas, who launched an official soccer Tumblr blog and bought placements on the user dashboard. One of the most fascinating news it that Adidas was Tumblr’s first official big advertising campaign! This launch came only two months after Tumblr announced it would be moving towards paid advertising on its site Much of the Tumblr’s features are accessed from the dashboard interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear.

The company was acquired by Yahoo in 2013!

Here’s how Tumblr works!

The site has a dashboard which is the main attraction for Tumblr users. Tumblr comprises of a live feed containing the most recent posts and uploads from texts, images, videos and links. The dashboard allows Tumblr’s users to upload a large range of content from video  short blogs.

With each passing year, Tumblr has gained prominence as a micro blogging platform which has allowed millions of people around the world to share whatever they like! The Tumblr.com has already achieved rapid growth and only seems like it is going to continue.

As of now, Tumblr is valued at $ 800 million.

The year was 1994 and Jeff Bezos, at the age of 30, realised internet and the world wide web was slowly taking over different parts of the world. Contemplating the idea of beginning his own e commerce firm, Bezos realised his true calling when statistics showed him web usage was growing by 2,300 % in the year 2000. He quit his job and started Amazon by making a list of 20 products he could potentially sell on the internet.

What started off as an idea in a garage bloomed. Bezos’s first investment came from his parents, who put a large sum of money to turn his dream into reality. Back in the day, Amazon was not what it is today. It was primarily an offline store, with a focus on selling rare and famous books! The first book was incidentally sold from Bezos’s garage!

Amazon.com launched its online bookselling site at a time when bookstore chains such as Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks and Crown Books were familiar storefronts in American shopping malls. Promoting itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore,” Amazon opened for business in July 1995, using major book distributors and wholesalers to rapidly fill its orders.

Back in the beginning, Amazon was sorely understaffed. Bezos’s expected his employees to work round the clock, punching in at least 60 hours a week! In fact, one of his employees was so busy, he forgot he had a car. He realised his faux pas when his email was flooded with tickets and notices!

Every employee had to take a graveyard shift in the fulfillment centers to meet orders. They would bring their friends and family and would often sleep in their cars before going to work the next day. It was only when Bezos realised the severity of the situation that he decided to hire seasonal employees who could work all through the year.

In the early 2000s, Jeff Wilke, Amazon’s operations manager, would let any person or team who accomplished a significant goal close their eyes, lean back and yell into the phone at him at the top of their lungs. Wilke told Brad Stone that some of the primal screams nearly blew out his speakers.

In the early days, it was difficult for the team to see how they could push beyond the $ 5 million mark. Once it did, Bezos made sure they clocked in at least one major achievement through the year and now, even so many years after, Amazon remains as one of the largest e commerce platforms in the world!