Why I Started Kiggle - A Kolkata Parent's Journey to Building India's Most Honest Kids Clothing Brand
By Shubham Kasera, Co-founder of Kiggle
I want to tell you a story. Not a polished brand story written by a marketing team, but the real one - the one that starts in 2021 with a newborn baby, a lot of confusion, and a growing frustration with an industry that was quietly letting Indian parents down.
It Started With My Son
When my child was born in 2021, I did what every new parent does. I wanted to build the safest possible environment for him. I read everything I could. I asked questions. I made careful choices about what he ate, what he touched, what surrounded him.
When it came to clothing, the answer seemed obvious - cotton. Everyone said cotton. Every doctor said cotton. Soft, breathable, natural cotton.
So I went to the big brands. The ones you see everywhere. The ones with beautiful packaging and reassuring language. And I bought cotton.
Except - it wasn't really cotton.
The Labels That Were Designed to Fool You
The more I read, the more I noticed something that made me genuinely angry as a parent.
Words like "cotton rich" and "better cotton" were everywhere. They sounded good. They were designed to sound good. But what they actually meant was that the fabric had more cotton than polyester - not that it was genuinely organic, genuinely safe cotton. It was a linguistic trick. A way of using the word cotton without actually giving your child pure cotton clothing.
I bought printed t-shirts from big marketplaces - the kind with fun characters and bright colours that children love. Most of them went back as returns. The prints felt stiff, almost plastic. The colours were clearly achieved with heavy chemical dyes. When I looked into it, I discovered that azo dyes - which are restricted or banned in many developed countries because of their potential health effects - are still completely standard in the Indian clothing industry. There is no mandatory requirement for Indian kids clothing brands to use safer alternatives.
Every human being's largest organ is their skin. Clothing is in contact with that skin every single moment of every single day. For a baby whose skin is 30% thinner than adult skin and who absorbs chemicals far more readily - what those clothes are made of and dyed with genuinely matters.
I was spending time and money on careful skincare for my son while dressing him in clothing treated with chemicals I would never deliberately put on his skin.
The Moment Everything Clicked
After months of frustration, I started buying kids clothing from brands outside India. Better fabric. Safer dyes. More honest labelling.
And then I discovered something that changed everything.
These products - the ones I was importing from abroad at premium prices - were manufactured in India. Often in cities not far from where I lived in Kolkata. The expertise, the manufacturing capability, the raw materials were all here. The knowledge existed. The capacity existed.
What was missing was a brand willing to do it right and make it affordable for Indian parents.
That was the moment I decided to build Kiggle.
Three Parents, One Movement
I am not the kind of person who builds things alone. The best ideas become real when the right people believe in them together.
Vineet Bahety is one of my closest friends. He also had a child in 2021 — we were going through the same experience simultaneously, asking the same questions, feeling the same frustrations. When I shared the idea for Kiggle, he did not just encourage me - he wanted to be part of it. He handles our finances and logistics, which means Kiggle runs with the same careful attention to numbers that he brought to his career as a commodity trader in Indonesia.
Adity Dokania is my sister-in-law, based in the United States. She has a strong technology background and a four-year-old of her own. She understood immediately why this mattered. She handles everything technology-related at Kiggle - which in a world where your entire store is online, is everything.
Together we cover the three things a brand needs to survive - product and marketing, finance and operations, and technology. More importantly, we are all parents. Every decision we make is filtered through the same question: would we put this on our own children?
What We Built and Why
Kiggle is not complicated. We had a simple brief: make the best possible clothing for Indian children, at prices Indian families can actually afford, without compromising on the things that matter.
That meant organic cotton. Not cotton rich, not better cotton - organic cotton, grown without synthetic pesticides and processed without harsh chemicals.
It meant azo-free dyes throughout our entire range. Every colour, every print, every garment - dyed with formulations that do not break down into harmful compounds against your child's skin. The same standard that countries like Germany mandated years ago.
It meant thinking beyond the clothes themselves. Every order from Kiggle ships in 100% compostable mailers made from corn. Not because it is good marketing - because we genuinely believe that the choices a brand makes today contribute to the world today's children will inherit as adults.
It meant starting with the basics. Not chasing trends, not adding unnecessary embellishments, not spending our cost budget on decorative details that do not make the clothing better. Our focus is fabric quality, thoughtful design and honest pricing.
And it meant EarthMint - our plant-based antibacterial treatment using peppermint oil that keeps garments fresher between washes. Because why use synthetic chemicals when nature already has the answer?
The Honest Truth About Where We Are
I want to be real with you.
Kiggle is barely a year old. There are still days when the three of us wonder whether this is going to work. Building a brand from scratch - finding manufacturers with the certifications we insist on, managing inventory without the deep pockets of an established business, convincing parents to trust a new name - it is not easy.
One of our biggest ongoing challenges is finding manufacturing partners who hold the certifications we require and are willing to work at the minimum order quantities a startup needs. Most certified organic manufacturers are used to working with large brands placing enormous orders. We have had to work hard to build relationships with partners who believe in what we are doing, not just the size of our orders.
But every challenge has made our foundations stronger. We have not once compromised on quality to reduce costs. We have not once used inferior dyes to save money. The standard we set on day one is the standard we hold today.
What Keeps Us Going
You want to know what gives us the confidence to keep going on the difficult days?
Repeat customers.
We have parents who have bought from Kiggle more than five times. Parents who started when their child was a newborn and are still buying as they grow into toddlers. Parents message us to say that their child refuses to wear anything else but Kiggle, as their clothes are so soft.
As a founder, you need that pat on the back sometimes. That validation that what you are doing matters - not in theory, but in practice, in the daily life of real families. Those repeat customers are everything to us. They are the proof that the idea was right.
In our first year, we have already grown from serving 2 to 6 year olds to covering the full range from 0 to 6 years. That expansion happened because parents trusted us with their older children and then came back when a new baby arrived.
Where Kiggle Is Going
Five years from now, I want Kiggle to be the answer to a simple question.
Ask any parent in India to name three kidswear brands. Kiggle should be one of them.
Not because we spent the most on advertising. Not because we had the most colourful packaging or the most Instagram-friendly campaigns. But because we built something genuinely trustworthy - clothing that parents know is safe, that children find comfortable, and that was made in a way that does not leave the planet worse than we found it.
We are already exploring what responsible growth looks like for Kiggle - potentially seeking investment to scale in a way that does not compromise the principles we started with. Whatever that path looks like, the brief stays the same: better clothes for Indian children, honest pricing, no shortcuts on quality.
A Message to Parents Reading This
If you are considering buying from Kiggle for the first time, I want you to know one thing.
We did not build Kiggle to start a business. We built it because we could not find what we wanted for our own children, and we believed other Indian parents deserved better than what was available.
When you dress your child in Kiggle clothing, you are not just buying a t-shirt or a romper. You are choosing organic cotton that did not need synthetic pesticides to grow. Azo-free colours that will not break down into harmful compounds against your child's skin. Packaging that will not sit in a landfill for 500 years. Clothing made in India, by Indian families, to a standard we are proud of.
We made it for the love of our own children's wardrobes - to make them more comfortable, healthier and to leave today's children with a slightly better planet when they grow up.
That is Kiggle. That is why we exist.
Shubham Kasera is co-founder of Kiggle, a Kolkata-based organic cotton kids and baby clothing brand. Kiggle makes clothing for babies and children aged 0 to 6 years. Shop at kiggle.shop.
Explore the full Kiggle range at kiggle.shop. Free shipping on orders above Rs 899.