Our Story - Pilolo: Innovating Kids' Clothing in UAE
All of life
Life starts with emotion - all of life, the little details, and the rest.
We, Megha and Raahul, grew surrounded by textures of different fabrics, their vibrant colors, glittering frills, twines and laces on our parents' work tables at two separate textile facilities in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu. As children, the sensory stimulus brought us joy and delight, it evoked wonder as we ran our hands over fabric looms and observed our parents interacting with vendors about clothing – familiar words that would become part of our future adult lives.
The Little Details
Several years later, as young adults, we dived headlong into our family business where we made several valuable connections, served industry leaders, and had the opportunity to introduce new ideas at our parents’ textile company, Dixcy Scott. The experience helped us hone our business skills, taught us the know-how of textile business but also pointed us to the true north of our business journey - innovation. For us innovation simply meant ‘acting on a new idea’ and seeing how the ‘idea’ performed in the market.
Trying new ideas became our focus. We had ideas, we implemented them, and saw how they were accepted and how they grew over time. The more we implemented new ideas, we began to seek out a space, time, energy, and a team to ‘experiment’ our ideas at whim.
PILOLO was one such idea.
…And the rest
Life came full circle when we had our kids. Our kids were getting a glimpse into our world of creating clothes. They too were being surrounded by lots of textures, fabric pieces, ribbons, buttons and laces. PILOLO began to take shape. It would be a clothing brand for kids aged 4-9 Yrs, and be known for being comfortable to wear and resonate with the child’s spirit to ‘stay silly’.
Our 8-year-old daughter emphatically told us that she felt pockets needed to be part of every piece of clothing so children like her could store up treasures and daily knick-knacks. As we acted on her idea and added pockets to all our pieces of clothing we heard from other kids who thought pockets on clothes was a great idea.
Our journey, so far, has taught us that when we begin from a place of joy, we work with joy and new ideas birth many more. At the essence of this venture is family, our memories of growing up with textures, with fabric, our collective delight and the space to try out new ideas.
“I think it’s a cute name to call someone” - Sia, when asked what she thinks about the word PILOLO.