ABOUT US | OUR STORY

COCOA: Where timeless charm meets contemporary flair with a curated couture collection of handcrafted designs in trend-setting silhouettes.

COCOA was conceived and conceptualized by our Founder and CEO – Mrs. Ritu Mathur.

Born into a family of lawyers, Ritu was being primed to be a practicing civil rights attorney one day, much like her father. While being trained to be articulate and assertive, yet always compassionate towards those in need; our young CEO often found herself sketching & creating dress-patterns & designs in all her time off the law.

By the age of eighteen, her sketch-book had already crossed 5000 pages, and somewhere she knew that her calling was perhaps in fashion & design. While she had already started dreaming of having her own fashion label one-day, she was equally committed to follow in her father’s footsteps and fend for those in need by practicing as a civil rights attorney.

As luck would have it, she got married at the young age of 22, and had to drop law-school to tend to her family & kids. All this while, when she was a stay-at-home Mom, she continued to create more & more designs, and her sketch-book continued to grow. It was within a few years, that she decided to finally pursue her dream of having her own fashion label. To create a funds corpus to enable her to launch her label, she started freelancing with various companies, designing clothing for them. It wasn’t too long before her designs made it to the cover pages of various global magazines and mail-order catalogues; where they were worn by the likes of Cindy Crawford and Carla Bruni.

At the age of 48, she was ultimately able to fulfil her life-long dream by launching her label – COCOA, a brand that specializes in bespoke handcrafted designs combining timeless charm with contemporary flair on a canvas of trend-setting silhouettes & modern couture designs.

Since Ritu specialized in creating embroidery design-patterns; she always relished gifted handcraftsmanship by craftsmen & artisans with a natural flair for the art. In fact, ensuring that each minute spec of detail is enthrallingly captured within the handcrafted designs soon became her magnum-opus. However, the once booming industry for these handcrafted embroideries was slowly dying out with the advent of mechanised systems to digitally create these embroideries over computers & machines.

 

OUR SOCIAL MISSION:

Our Founder-CEO, though having branched-out into the fashion industry, never let go of the ideals celebrated by her father to look-out for those in need. In the present day and age, where all fashion labels are aiming towards cost-cuts and mass-production by making use of mechanically created apparel & embroideries; COCOA exclusively focuses on hand-crafting embroideries and clothes, thereby employing the craftsmen & artisans who now form part of a dying industry, and are mostly out of jobs.

Each individual product manufactured by COCOA, gives a day’s livelihood to one such craftsman/artisan. We currently employ many such gifted and talented artisans (many of which are women), and they are directly supervised by our Founder-CEO Mrs. Ritu Mathur. We also employ the services of various ad-hoc handcraft artisans, who specialize in certain types of embroidery-handwork (such as sequin-work, patch-work, dori-embroidery, etc.); thereby providing livelihood to these specialized craft-communities as well.

 

OUR DESIGNS:

It is our ardent belief that the mechanically created clothing and apparel can never match-up to the precision, craft & finesse that is achieved by the gifted & skilled craftsmen & artisans. Accordingly, COCOA products are exquisitely handcrafted by individual craftsmen. Some products are further blended with handmade embroideries – all exclusively handcrafted by specialized artisans and craftsmen.

Unlike the routine mechanically-created apparel; the feel, touch and look of our clothes is mesmeric, and reflects the heart & soul of each of the individual craftsmen involved in its production.

The fabrics used for our products are all procured in the best of quality and imported from various regions across the globe. These materials are thereafter moulded into perfection by the gifted hands of our curated team of hand-craftsmen and artisans.