Who we are
Zahke is Australia's dedicated platform for South Asian fashion — think Net-a-Porter, but built exclusively for emerging Indian designers.

We curate and represent independent designers from India, bringing their work to Australian and New Zealand audiences through a single trusted platform — one rooted in sustainability, ethical production, and a genuine love for what Indian fashion actually is: complex, sophisticated, and centuries deep.

Each piece in our collections is consciously created — using handloom weaves, block prints, embroidery traditions, and sustainable textiles. Not as aesthetic choices. As living craft.

What Zahke means
Zahke is a tribute to the next generation. The name is a blend of our founder's daughters' names — representing heritage, identity, and the bridge between cultures.

Zahke symbolises women who are bold, free-thinking, and powerful. Women who hold both worlds — their heritage and their present — without having to choose between them.

Why Zahke exists
Zahke was founded because of a frustration — and a belief.
The frustration: watching brands founded by people outside our culture romanticise Indian craft. Block printing from Jaipur. Fabrics you could find in Sarojini Nagar market for a few dollars, packaged up and sold here for hundreds. Presented as exotic. As discovered. As theirs.

That is not what Indian fashion is. Our textile heritage is one of the most sophisticated in the world — our weaves, our embroidery traditions, techniques passed down through generations of artisans. None of that complexity was being represented here. What was being represented was a curated aesthetic, built on our culture, by people outside it.

The belief: that story deserved to be told by us.
That the designers who actually carry this knowledge — young, independent, talented Indian designers — deserved a platform built with them in mind, not around them. That South Asian women in Australia who have spent years choosing between fashion that reflects their heritage and fashion that fits their lives here deserved both.

Zahke's story starts in a small store in Pune, where Gunjan Allen — a South Asian woman building a fashion platform on the other side of the world — walked in and met Sanket Bhansali of Bougainvillea.

What followed wasn't just a business partnership. It was the beginning of a blueprint: go looking for the real thing, find the designers who actually carry the knowledge, and build something together.

Bougainvillea remains at the heart of Zahke today. And that chance meeting in Pune remains the way Zahke finds its designers — not through submissions or algorithms, but through genuine connection.

Gunjan has always believed that the clothes we wear carry stories worth telling. Zahke is her answer to a fashion landscape that overlooked the brilliance of independent Indian designers for too long — and the women in Australia and New Zealand who deserved access to their work.

Our story is still unfolding. Every designer we add, every piece we carry, and every customer who chooses to wear something made with genuine intention is part of it.

If any of this resonates — as a customer, a designer, or simply someone who has felt the same frustration — you are exactly who Zahke was built for.