Founders Story
📍 How It Started
We met in 2018 at Ashoka University for Young India Fellowship. I, Apoorva was a full-time ecommerce entrepreneur, part-time white-collar hippie. I lived for trippy music, existential dread and strong AF coffee. I could calculate profit margins, manage ten client calls and charm a theka into early opening– all before lunch. I was a liberal arts soul stuck in a capitalistic bubble…until Ashoka flung the door wide open.
Sanjana was an American NRI who thought kurtis were still the norm. She had come to Young Indian Fellowship for a year to “explore her roots” with a suitcase full of kurtis & was going to bed at 9 PM, waking up for class at 8 AM like she was in a finishing school.
Two weeks in, Sanju asks if I’m going to Delhi and if I can “get her 1 bottle of ALC.”
I spend hours hunting for an imported wine called ALC.
Spoiler: it doesn’t exist. She just meant alcohol.
NRI shorthand meets Delhi girl overthinking – and the universe clearly approved, because from that moment, we were inseparable.
👯♀️ The Fellowship Era
We lived two doors apart and basically went through college like a joint project:
As her new bestie, I also ended up as her translator…helping her get over the cultural shock and deal with the heartbreak that her one year abroad was nothing like St.Xavier’s in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. She’d definitely ended up on a set completely unprepared with a Karan Johar script that nobody else was interested in. I quickly stepped in for damage control.
We chugged vodka between the lectures. Broke into faculty rooms at night to lounge in their comfy cushions. Escaped to Delhi for pancakes, Starbucks, and sangria. Cried over existential dread one night, blasted EDM music in the shower the next. We were low-key reprogramming each other’s entire lives over dosas and cheese burst pizzas.
We didn’t know it then, but we were already building what Laref is now – a world where women can be feral and feminine, soft and unstoppable, lost and legendary… all in the same day.
She was the first female friend who wasn’t competing with me.
I was the first friend here who understood her, underneath the accent. We gave each other permission to be unfiltered, messy, ambitious, soft – all at once.
💼 After Ashoka
Then YIF ended.
She flew back to the US. I stayed in India. She thought she’d be a lawyer, I told her she should be in fashion (because duh).
She switched from pre-med/pre-law to fashion merchandising, worked at Victoria’s Secret, then became a brand manager at Sephora.
I rejoined my business and married my long-term boyfriend in 2019.
Of course Sanju flew back for it - missing my wedding was never an option.
2020 hit. COVID shut everything down.
I was a newlywed trying to keep a loss-making business alive.
Then in 2021, Sanjana got married to her first love. They settled in the Bay Area and she convinced herself that a merchandising corporate job at Sephora adjacent to her dream marketing roles would make her happy. It didn’t.
We both felt like our Ashoka selves had been replaced with “functional adults” who ticked the right boxes but felt hollow inside.
For the first time since we met, we went 1.5 years without seeing each other.
On paper? Successful.
In reality? Depressed.
💔 The Wake-Up Call
I fly to the US in July 2023 to meet her. Except now we’re older, a little broken, and holding more pain than we’ve ever admitted.
We both spent a weekend together and it felt like we just needed to meet to realize that our present life can’t go on like this.
In 2023, she quits Sephora. Early 2024, I file for divorce.
It’s ugly & exhausting.
Then in Feb 2025, I found my first solo apartment. Sanju’s husband sees the opportunity and says “Guys, it’s time to start your business. Stop talking about it and go do it.” Sanju and her suitcases (filled authentically with crop tops and summer dresses this time) move in for 60 days to go full start up mode. She leaves her country, her comfort zone, her career limbo to sit with me in my mine.
We wake up, make coffee, cry over old voice notes, eat Maggi at 1 AM… and start believing in our dreams again.
✨ The Pivot and Opening of Laref Circle
Everybody says their college years are their peak. Sanju and I are notorious for extending the peak. We wanted the rest of our life feel like college. Sure adulthood adds stresses but what if we got to replace our “job stress” with the stress of working on a college project.
We needed a company together. Basically a college project funded with our savings from corporate.
Ok, so it wasn’t an MBA-approved business plan...yet.
Sanju had an idealistic dream. Live life with people she loved. Unfortunately the people she needed most were separated not by cities, states or even countries - it was continents.
She came to me saying “bridge the gap because growing up and growing apart is not an option.”
The question was never, “What company should we start?”
The problem statement was: How do two women, living saat samundar paar, keep dreaming together and build a world where they - and all women- can be themselves completely?
That’s how Laref Circle was born.
Now as head of e-commerce - I needed a business model to fix this problem statement.
💍 What We’re Building
We didn’t start it to “enter the jewellery market.”
Jewelry is a shared love. It’ a love language shipped across countries, spoken in multiple dialects, passed down from generations that allow us to take golden chains and form identities.
Also there was a gap in the market. Sanju was tired of dragging jewelry back and forth. She wasn’t down for the responsibility of carrying gold But replacing her artificial jewelry every trip due to tarnishing wasn’t a solution either.
That’s when I got my excel and ecommerce data insights out. Turned out (appy say something here about how the market’s ready in excel language).
Jewelry became the project we could work on together. It’s what we played in as girls, it’s what we wore when we moved through marriage, it’s what we held on to as adulthood started to wreck us.
We started it to make space. For women like us.
Moving through childhood, to adulthood. All while holding on to girlhood.
The ones who refuse to pick a lane.
The ones who can be the good girl, the meltdown girl, the spreadsheet girl, the party girl – all in the same day.
The ones who can hold ambition and softness without apologising for either.
We name collections like they’re our children, argue over fonts like it’s life or death, and laugh our way through website crashes and supplier calls.
💬 Why We’re Doing This
We weren’t supposed to meet. Not in Sonipat. Not in a liberal arts course.
It made zero sense – An American citizen and a Delhi businesswoman suddenly pressing pause on life to study poetry, politics and philosophy.
But we signed up anyway.
Something pulled us in that neither of us could explain.
Now we know why.
We had to meet.
So if you ask, Why are we starting a brand?
Because we missed each other.
Because we want to build a world in which women never have to shrink in.
Because we want more women like us to find each other.
Because we’re redefining what it means to be feminine and in charge.
Because we want girls to take up every inch of the space that’s theirs.
This brand is a protest. And a celebration.
A middle finger and a group hug in one.
So gear up girls, girlhood now has a GST number!