ALMOST A HUNDRED years ago, when famous weaver Nalli Chinnasami Chetty started a small store from his house in Chennai’s T. Nagar to manufacture exquisite silks and pure Kanchipuram sarees, it was unimaginable that a woman would be at the helm of affairs at any point. But that is exactly what has happened at one of India’s oldest family-run enterprises that sells more than 2 million sarees annually. For Lavanya Nalli, the 38-year-old Vice Chairman of Nalli Silk Sarees, that had a turnover of `570 crore in FY21, things weren’t easy when she joined the business in 2005. “Retail was still a dirty word then,” says Lavanya Nalli, who was the first woman from her family to join the business. After completing her engineering, she had around three weeks free, which she spent in Nalli’s back office.
And she was hooked. “I was fascinated with the retail aspect. So much goes on behind the scenes,” she says. “We had all the systems and processes in place but it was all done by people.” The first thing she did was start work on automating the processes. Having worked at Nalli for a few years she went to Harvard for her MBA, after which she worked at McKinsey and Myntra before rejoining the family business in 2016. Lavanya Nalli says she had to find her
