About us

Smart Choice has been selling sarees since 1975. The showroom opened that year in Gondia, Maharashtra, and has been run by the same family ever since — half a century of one room, shelves of cloth, and whoever came through the door.

For forty-five of those years that was the whole business. There was no catalogue and no website; there was a counter, and the only way to see what had come in was to walk in and ask.

Then 2020 closed the shops. We had been drop-shipping crockery on the side, so one evening we went live on Facebook to sell it — from the house, with a vendor’s stock stacked in the front room, because there was nowhere else to sell from. Seven hundred people watched. That was the evening the business turned: if seven hundred people would sit through a live about crockery, they would sit through cloth we had chosen ourselves.

So the lives moved to the showroom, and they have run from there ever since — a saree unfolded, turned to the light, and described as honestly as it can be described. The shop had traded as Kothari Collections for years, and still does over its own door. The name that went online came from somewhere else: Smart Choice was what our drop-shipping WhatsApp group had been called, and when the lives needed a name it was the one already in everybody’s phone. Five lakh followers later, it is the name.

What has not changed is how a saree gets chosen here. It is done with the hands and the eyes — the weight of it across a palm, the way a border catches the light when you turn it. That is knowledge which only ever passes from hand to hand, and it is why we still buy piece by piece rather than by the carton.

The showroom in Gondia is still open, and still ours. If you are ever near, come in.