In the Bag

An Indian-expat businesswoman in Hong Kong veers from a career in ecommerce to making colourful purses

- Casey Hynes

Yosha Gupta’s life came full circle when she founded Meraki, her luxury handbag company. Gupta, 35, grew up watching her mother create art using lumps of charcoal, as charcoal drawing pencils weren’t available in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, where they lived. Her mother’s talent inspired a lifelong love of art in Gupta, though her own career path led her to found LafaLafa, an online cashback and coupon business based in India. But she became a patron of Indian folk artists, collecting their work and helping bring Indian performers abroad after she moved to Hong Kong. Gupta even commissioned Indian artists to embellish her personal stash of designer handbags with folk paintings, unwittingly planting the seeds of her next business.