The next time you need to travel, you might want to try picking up your footwear from Fuuchsia, a start-up that’s making customisable footwear that lets you have many looks with a single pair.
The company’s lead designer, city girl Rupali Naidu, who graduated from NIFT Hyderabad in 2011, says their focus is on creating shoes that last longer and feel worth the money that people shell out for footwear in general. She says that they’re not looking at people who’d buy shoes very often, “but buy good quality ones, use them for a long time and come back to us”.
“The idea behind the shoes was to make footwear affordable,” says Rupali, a former St. Andrews student, adding, “Most of us face this problem; when we travel somewhere, we’re not satisfied with just one pair because it doesn’t go with everything we wear. We want heels, flats, something for office wear. So we end up piling too many things up in our baggage. Our shoes will solve that problem and will help people travel lighter. This was the first problem that we recognised.”
Rupali majored in fashion and lifestyle accessories at NIFT, but shoe design was always a passion for her. “I interned for four months at Soles in Bengaluru. That was when I really got into shoe design, and learned the technical aspects of it, and I even got called back to work with them for about two-and- a-half-years.”
She wanted to get her own boutique up and running, but realising it would need huge capital, took up interior design for a while, freelancing shoe design projects on the side to keep herself in touch with the footwear industry.
She eventually met her co-founder, Debadyuti Roy Chowdhury, an MBA graduate looking to make it big as an entrepreneur. Debadyuti decided to pursue the idea, which started out as a pitch for a college project while he was getting his MBA, when a professor told him that for a two-week trip to the US she had carried 17 pairs of shoes. “This idea sounded like the most viable one,” he says, “We reached out to Rupali a few months ago. I wanted to make this project really big, so I wanted to do whatever it took.”
Each pair of Fuuchsia’s shoes comes with a base design (choose six options) and three interchangeable straps and fittings that can be used to customise them for any look. “We’ve been doing a lot of market surveys and interacting with women from different fields, and everybody’ concern is that they can’t wear just one pair of shoes, because they have Indian wear, casual wear, formals and more,” says Rupali, “Even if I own a shoe that’s turquoise in colour and costs me Rs 6,000, I can’t wear them with everything. There will always be something I want to change about it.”
The shoes, that will be priced between Rs 2,500 and Rs 6,000, can also be customised by the designers themselves, which may take up to two-three weeks to create and deliver.
