Pia Ka Ghar, was conceived as a nostalgic journey back to Bengal, its ethos, its sentiments, Tagore songs and concepts of timeless love. In the 37+ years that I’ve lived in the U.S. there was never a place where I could shop for the kind of sarees I could find in Bengal. I would dream of buying sarees, white sarees with red borders and wearing them with a sindurer teep (red big bindi). I would buy jamdanis, tangails, kanthas, silks and chiffons in my dreams. 14 years ago I started Pia Ka Ghar as an enterprise to empower women engaged in ‘kantha’, the Bengali art of Stitch painting in Bolpur, Bengal.

The enterprise empowered not only the women who were doing this painstaking work, it empowered the buyers in the U.S. who felt good about the sarees they bought and felt an enhanced self esteem. In 2010, we opened up my home, Pia Ka Ghar (where the boutique has been housed for 14 years) to embrace the world. For customers all over the world have been writing and phoning for us to do so.  Kantha, and Gara Parsis, have been very underserved outside of India, and it became one of my goals to bring these indigenous arts to western consciousness. In 2010, we took on the responsibility of bringing Sabyasachi sarees to the world and quickly became his largest U.S. retailer. This is not just because he is one of the best designer in India today but his ethos/pov/world view is totally in sync with mine and I championed every stitch of every garment we sold. Sabyasachi has his feet firmly planted in Bengal while he draws inspiration from the world. I am a very ordinary Bengali girl but I, too, belong to the world. We want you, our web customer to have a beautiful experience while you are on our site. We want you to feel love, passion, romance, the pleasure of great sex and friendship. We just don’t sell sarees, we are dream merchants and each saree is a dream of yours coming true just as it was a poem of mine coming to life. We cannot reach out and touch you but we want to caress you with our words so that you feel understood and empowered.

Pia

Pia Ganguly is the Founder of Pia Ka Ghar (PKG). Pia studied at the Universities of Calcutta and California, and worked as the Senior Vice President/Controller of a software company. She has written two books of poems, Images on a Stroll and Head of a Woman and is working on a third one. She lives in a wood-side home in California with her 3 children and 5 dogs. She rescues dachshunds, and anyone else in need of rescue. Pia has world class mentors who have run Fortune 500 companies, who are giant entrepreneurs and industrialists, who have worked at McKinsey and who have been educated at the finest schools in the world.

Our “lets go” team

Our team members have specific functions but if necessary, everyone does everything. This team is “customer centric” and to all of us the customer is the MVP and we want to exceed our customer’s expectations.

Shona Ganguly

Neel Ganguly

Ishan Ghosh

Rima Mutreja

Cecile Lelievre

Priya Banerjee

Amit Basu

Meenakshi Kaul Basu

Our “mascot”

Gigi, a piebald dachshund, who is the first member of our Board.