Threads of Surat

Surat is built by people who arrived with little but resolve, turning hardship into high-growth enterprises. Their stories reveal a city that rewards speed, grit and practical intelligence—a place where partnerships form easily, risks are absorbed quickly and learning never stops. Here, ambition meets an ecosystem that converts effort into scale, making enterprise almost instinctive.

It’s a paradox wrapped in polyester. Surat—the city that spins out 60 million metres of manmade fabric every single day—stands on the verge of an industrial chokehold. With 700,000 looms running and ₹200 billion in turnover, India’s synthetic hub is built on imported muscle: machines, yarn, and know-how. Now, a compliance rule threatens to pull the plug on that ecosystem—testing whether the synthetic capital can truly stitch together scale, self-reliance, and sustainability before the loom slows down.

In Surat’s textile maze, there’s a fast fashion player going sustainable with almost zero minimums, made-to-order fabrics, and size-inclusive garments shipped across India and beyond. Flipping the bulk-first playbook, from one metre to a multi-crore business, Fabcurate’s small-batch smarts with print, cut, stitch, ship is scaling big as it rewrites the e-commerce rulebook.

Surat-based Man Made Textiles Research Association or MANTRA is one of the eight national level Textiles Research Associations (TRAs) and one among the leading in man-made fibres. While the key focus is the textile industry in the synthetic capital of the country, it works on the overall textile development and on technical textiles in general. In conversation with Director Dr Arup Rakshit.

From bootstrapped beginnings to a ₹230 crore powerhouse, the True Colors story is far from over. Having mastered the art of resilience, the company is now writing its next chapter — one defined by expansion, innovation, and self-reliance. This is the second and concluding part of the story.

From borrowed ₹4 lakh at a 10x15 feet leased basement to a sweeping 2,00,000 square feet with a turnover of around ₹230 crore, Surat-headquartered True Colors Ltd delivers a vertically integrated ecosystem for digital fabric printing, from machinery to sublimation paper, inks, printing services and countrywide support. Read the journey of a start-up as it navigated the choke points to emerge as a cutting force with a country wide imprint.