Akshika Poddar
Co-Founder, The House of Rare | Rareism | RareFore
Akshika Poddar is a founder who builds from the inside out with style and confidence, starting with people, then product, then scale. As Co-Founder of The House of Rare, she plays a deeply active role in shaping the business, balancing creative instinct with a sharp love for numbers and decision making grounded in data.
Born into a textile family, Akshika grew up understanding fabric not just as material, but as structure, movement, and emotion. That early exposure gave her fluency in design, but her entrepreneurial lens was shaped later. She didn’t enter fashion to follow trends; she entered it to fix gaps.
Rareism was launched in 2019 from a simple, personal insight, that Indian women deserved clothing that worked with their bodies and lifestyles, not against them. What began as a solution-driven brand has since grown into a belief system. Rareism champions ease without compromise, offering thoughtfully designed silhouettes that transition seamlessly from desk to dinner. For Akshika, comfort is not a category, it is a form of confidence.
Rareism is more than a name, it’s a mindset. By turning ‘rare’ into an ideology, Akshika shaped the brand around self-expression, quiet confidence, and femininity on one’s own terms. Today, Rareism spans across 55+ exclusive brand outlets stores and 250+ total footprint including multi-brand outlets, with a strong online presence at marketplaces and D2C, emerging as one of India’s fastest-growing contemporary womenswear brands.
In 2025, she introduced RareFore, an experience-led cultural platform under The House of Rare. Conceived as a space to honour artists, craftsmen, and storytellers, RareFore reflects Akshika’s belief that brands must actively participate in culture, not merely borrow from it. The platform marks a shift towards slower, intentional engagement with art, community, and meaning.
A strong advocate for women’s empowerment, Akshika leads with empathy and conviction. She believes leadership is not about visibility alone, but about building an environment where people and talent can grow with confidence. Her philanthropic efforts focus on education and holistic development, encouraging children to believe in their potential and pursue it with courage.
Beyond business, Akshika is shaped by culture; music, books, and cinema form a constant backdrop to her thinking. Travel plays a defining role in her worldview. Time spent across cities and cultures informs her perspective, sharpens her design sensibility, and continuously feeds into how she thinks about relevance and form. A lot of her perspective is also shaped by observing how people live, consume, and make choices today. Her ambition is simple but enduring, to create brands that remain relevant years from now, loved enough to be worn, and re-worn.
Based in Bengaluru with her husband Manish Poddar and four children Karam, Sahaat, Shivang and Marisha, Akshika Poddar continues to build with clarity and curiosity. Equal parts creative and analytical, she represents a new generation of Indian women founders, those who design with feeling, build with discipline, and think long term.
