Saraswati Saree Depot is a bridge between India’s fragmented weaving clusters and the thousands of small retailers who dress the country - a B2B wholesaler that stocks more than 300,000 different saree and apparel designs under one roof so shopkeepers can buy in bulk without chasing hundreds of individual weavers. Founded in 1966 as a small family partnership in Kolhapur, the business spent three generations building direct relationships with over 900 suppliers across Surat, Varanasi, Madurai and other weaving hubs before listing on the stock exchanges in 2024. The recurring approach is simple: buy in enormous quantities from a dispersed supplier base, display an unrivalled range in two giant wholesale stores, and sell to a highly diversified set of over 13,000 retailer customers - no single customer accounts for even a tenth of sales, so the business never depends on any one relationship.
Business segments
A single wholesale engine with a small retail pilot attached - one business that sources, stocks and distributes women’s ethnic apparel, plus a measured experiment in selling directly to consumers.
1. Saree and women’s apparel wholesale: the warehouse-sized catalogue
Two cavernous stores in Maharashtra hold more than 300,000 SKUs, letting thousands of small retailers walk in and fill their shops with sarees, kurtis and dress materials sourced from weaving hubs across India - no middlemen between the weaver and the store.
- Sarees are the anchor product - sarees contributed 89.3% of revenue in FY26, making them the economic engine that pulls everything else along; the company sold 1.57 crore individual clothing pieces that year.
- Two physical stores do nearly all the work - the flagship Kolhapur location and a second store in Ulhasnagar together cover over 185,000 square feet, with Kolhapur alone generating nearly 88% of overall sales because it sits in a trading hub with strong vendor access.
- Sourced from 900 weavers, not a few factories - the company buys from over 900 suppliers across Surat, Varanasi, Mau, Madurai, Dharmavaram, Kolkata and Bengaluru, with the top 10 suppliers accounting for less than 26% of purchases, so no single weaver has pricing power over it.
- Customers are too small and too many to squeeze margins - over 13,000 unique customers bought in FY26, and the top 10 together contributed less than 8% of total sales, which means the company does not live or die by any one retailer’s fortunes.
- Geography is concentrated by design - the West zone (Maharashtra and Goa) brought in 85.6% of revenue and the South zone (Karnataka and Tamil Nadu) the remaining 14.4%, with no sales in the North or East, reflecting a deliberate focus on regions the Dulhani family knows intimately.
2. Retail pilot: a measured step into selling direct
A single 15,000-square-foot flagship store in Kolhapur tests whether the company can sell sarees and ethnic wear straight to consumers, capturing retail margins on top of its wholesale base - but it is barely 1% of sales.
- Forward integration from the wholesale backbone - launched in June 2025 with an investment of up to ₹2.8 crore, the store takes the same curated sarees and ethnic wear the company already stocks and offers them directly to walk-in consumers in its home market of Kolhapur.
- Small enough to learn, not bet the company - the retail initiative contributed approximately 1% of sales as of Q3 FY26, making it a contained experiment rather than a second engine.
Group structure and partners
A family-run, debt-free public company with no subsidiaries - just one wholesale business, a 50% stake in a joint-venture partnership in Ahmednagar, and a newly approved option to enter real estate development if the board ever chooses to.
- Promoter family with deep operational involvement - the Chairman, Shankar Dulhani, has 38 years in the apparel industry, while the MD and CEO, Vinod Dulhani, has over 27 years and personally built the weaving-house connections that feed the business.
- A board split evenly between family and independents - four executive directors and four non-executive independent directors govern the company, so half the boardroom has no ties to the promoters.
- Real estate permission obtained, no activity yet - shareholders voted 99.95% in favour of altering the Memorandum of Association in January 2026 to allow real estate development, but the core object of trading in sarees and garments remains unchanged and no real estate operations have begun.