Krisha Patel: From a Wabi-Sabi Collection at Parul University to Senior Merchandiser!

The most buzzing moment of Krisha Patel’s journey is when she called her father from a bus ride from Ahmedabad to Vadodara. With all the courage, excitement, and thrill she felt, she conveyed that she had finally secured her dream internship.

That instinct, to go and get the thing rather than wait for it to be arranged, is the thread running through a Parul University fashion design placement story that ends with a full-time offer before graduation. Along the way, there is an award-winning graduation collection, a men’s jacket that reached a national showcase, and a job most fashion graduates take years to reach.

She enrolled in the design programme at Parul Institute of Design in 2022, from Unjha in Mehsana, knowing she loved colour, fabric and form and not much else about what the next four years would demand.

Her roots are from Unjha, a town in the Mehsana district of Gujarat. As more driven towards colour, fabric and design from her very childhood, that instinct turned into a design direction, followed by B.Des Fashion Design as an answer.

Krisha Patel’s decision to study design formally brought her to Parul University in 2022. Wanting to be a designer, as she puts it, is one thing; doing the work to become one is another, and she arrived understanding that the next four years were the difference between the two.

Design education is a demanding discipline everywhere, and Krisha is candid that her four years were a rollercoaster. The work runs on a cycle of thinking, drawing, making, fixing, pulling apart and starting again, against deadlines that feel impossible and submissions that consume nights. And finally comes the main day – Jury Day – a day when the student showcases their work to the fashion panel, and that was the day the pressure got real for Krisha Patel.

There were stretches of self-doubt in which she questioned the decisions that had brought her into so demanding a field. That is an honest account of design school rather than a complaint about it, and it is worth stating plainly for any student considering the course.

What made it survivable was the people. The friends she made became, in her description, family, and that support system is what carried her through the academic schedule. Alongside the chaos, the university gave her the memories of her youth and a set of lessons that had nothing to do with the syllabus.

“Design school runs on a cycle of making, tearing apart and starting again. The friends are what make it survivable.”

For a fashion student, the graduation collection is the test that gathers four years into a single runway. Krisha came to the Parul University fashion show in December 2025, and she made a deliberate choice about it: she did not want to do glamour.

Instead, she and her team built the collection on Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese philosophy that finds beauty in imperfection, incompleteness and impermanence. It is a demanding idea to translate into clothing, because it cannot be decorated onto a garment. It has to be built into one.

That meant working through texture, draping, raw finishes and a muted palette, and holding the concept steady across every piece so the philosophy read through the fabric rather than sitting on top of it. The collection won Best Collection of the Year, an award she describes as the highlight of her student life and, by her own cheerful admission, the thing she intends to keep mentioning for the rest of it.

The award mattered for a reason beyond the trophy. It validated a design sensibility she had chosen against the obvious option, and it proved she could stand out in a competitive field on her own terms.

Her other proudest moment arrived from a place she had not been looking. In her sixth semester, a project required students to work in menswear, and Krisha had to make a men’s jacket.

A structured jacket is among the hardest things to make well. The patterns have to be right, the fabric cut precisely, the layers assembled with care, and the sewing exact enough that the lapels and shoulders sit as they should. She wanted to understand how a men’s jacket is actually built, and she worked at it accordingly.

The result was good enough that her faculty noticed, and then something she had not anticipated happened: the jacket was selected for showcase at Spectrum 2025, a festival at the National Institute of Fashion Technology. A student garment made for a semester project ended up on a national stage, which is a reasonable definition of work speaking for itself.

As the final years closed in and the question of internships began to occupy her batch, Krisha noticed how most students were handling it: waiting for the college to arrange campus placements, or for an opportunity to be handed over. She took a different route.

She went looking for herself and found an opening at Fashion Fair Apparels Pvt. Ltd., a garment manufacturing and export company based in Ahmedabad. Then she did something that says a great deal about how much she wanted it. She did not tell her parents she was going.

She travelled to Ahmedabad alone, nervous and determined, and found the interview itself surprisingly relaxed. The panel could see the work, the knowledge behind it and the appetite to learn, and she cleared it comfortably.

The part of the story she loves is the bus back to Vadodara, when she finally called her father and said she had an internship in Ahmedabad. His response, by her account, was to ask when exactly this had happened. She had arranged the entire thing herself, and it is the moment she says she will remember permanently.

“She travelled to another city for an interview her parents did not know about, and called home only once she had the offer.”

At Fashion Fair Apparels, Krisha worked as a Sampling Coordinator, a role at the centre of how clothing actually gets made. Before any garment goes into bulk production, a sample has to be produced and approved by the buyer, and there is no margin for error in it. She handled that process for brands including Being Human, Pantaloons and Azorte, inside an apparel export industry that sits among India’s largest employers and is overseen at the national level by the Ministry of Textiles.

The daily work was demanding and specific.

• Reading technical sheets: Interpreting the designer’s specifications, measurements, fabric selection and construction detail.
• Coordinating across departments: Working with pattern makers, fabric sourcing, stitching and quality control to turn a specification into a physical sample.
• Managing buyer approval: Sending the finished sample, waiting on the buyer’s response, and driving revisions when something was not right.
• Following up relentlessly: Chasing detail and timelines across every team involved, every day.

For someone who had arrived at university too shy to introduce herself to a classroom, this was a transformation rather than a job. The role required constant negotiation, communication and follow-through with people at every level, and it built a confidence that four years of coursework had only begun. She had stopped being a student who wanted to design clothes and become a professional in the clothing business.

The management at Fashion Fair Apparels watched how she worked, how she held up under pressure, and how she ran sampling for demanding brands. Before her internship had formally ended, they offered her a full-time position, and she accepted.

Securing a full-time role on performance alone, before officially graduating, is an outcome very few design students reach. The path from there is defined. She spends four months in intensive merchandising training, covering costing, material procurement, production planning and business management, after which she steps up as a Senior Merchandiser handling brands independently.

Krisha is clear that the merchandising role is not the destination. Her ambition is her own fashion brand, and the interesting part is how deliberately she is preparing for it. She already knows she can design an award-winning collection. What she is doing now is acquiring half of the business that sketching does not teach: supply chains, costing, profit margins, vendor management and consumer psychology. She is learning how the market works from inside a company before putting her name on a label. That is the same logic that runs through the startup and entrepreneurship ecosystem at Parul University, where PIERC has incubated and supported 254 student ventures with more than Rs 20+ crore in funding, and where student founders reach investors through the annual Vadodara Startup Festival.

She does not know when the brand launches. She is certain it will, and she is patient about the sequence: absorb the industry first, build the label second. For a design student, that is an unusually clear-eyed plan.

→ PIERC: 254 startups built from problems students noticed

Asked what she would tell the juniors still in the middle of it, her answer is practical and slightly contradictory, which is what makes it honest.

Her view is that the industry favours the bold and the proactive, which is not an abstract belief in her case. It is a description of how she got hired.

“Deadlines don’t care about your happiness.” – Krisha Patel