A brand from a refined atelier

Forty-five years after it was founded, major leather goods brand Hidesign competes with the likes of Charles Keith. Today, the company operates 103 stores, is in the process of opening another 4, and has spread its presence across 25 countries.

- Bobo Meitei

Dilip Kapur was very much a part of the incredible idealism of changing the world' that swept across many parts of the world in the 60s and 70s when he was in the US, where he had lived for 15 years. When he returned to Puducherry's Auroville, he wanted to recreate that world. "Then there was nothing. It was a barren land. I was in a one-roomed house with no running water, in its place was a hand pump," he recalls. He started playing with bags as a hobby, a craft that he had learned when he was finishing PHD at the University of Denver, School of International Studies in International Affairs. "I needed a job and had applied at many places, and joined a business. At its factory, I was trained in leather work."

To Kapur, counterculture, freedom, equality, and non-discrimination are values, and Hidesign's earliest bags that hit the 'counterculture stores' of San Francisco, London, and Melbourne were a message expressed through them. They established an 'underground reputation for being radically different'. They were quite different from those natural, ecological, and products of skilled craftsmanship created at that time in Europe and the United States.

Retail

Forty-five years after it was founded, the major leather goods brand Hidesign competes with the likes of Charles Keith. Today, the company operates 103 stores, is in the process of opening another 4, and has spread its presence across 25 countries. About the recently opened store at Delhi's Khan Market, Kapur says, "It is so much like Punducherry. A little bit of French heritage, a whole lot of Pundicherry - Our 'amour' (love) for style may be influenced by our French heritage but our skilled craft is all Pundicherry! The architecture is an homage to the quaint little town that made us who we are!"