Global Desi Brand Guidelines: Anita Dongre’s 2007 Boho Label and Its Beaked g

Anita Dongre’s Indo-western line.

Global Desi is a women’s wear label created by the Indian fashion designer Anita Dongre. Dongre set up her first business in 1999, launching it with the opening of the Crossword mall in Mumbai, FashionUnited reported in December 2013; that company, known for the western-wear label AND, later added Global Desi and her own Anita Dongre label. The brand’s website gives 2007 as Global Desi’s founding year, as did FashionUnited in reports of October 2013 and April and May 2014. Other reports give 2008: FashionUnited itself in December 2014 and July 2016, and Retail4Growth in June 2016, which named Mumbai as the place and quoted the brand’s chief operating officer as saying its first store had opened eight years earlier.

Accounts of the parent company differ in the same way. Global Desi’s website says Dongre set up her first brand in 1999, matching the 2013 report. A FashionUnited report of July 2016 instead said the company, by then called House of Anita Dongre, was founded in 1995 by Dongre, Meena Sehra and Mukesh Sawlani, and listed its other labels as AND, for contemporary western wear, and the Anita Dongre label, covering bridal, couture, prêt, menswear and jadau jewellery.

In 2013 FashionUnited described Global Desi as a label built around boho dresses, colourful skirts and bangles, and said its designs drew on the traditions of Rajasthan. English Wikipedia calls it a boho-chic brand inspired by the folk tales of India. The brand’s own site says it “celebrates the distinctive style of the modern Indian woman” with India-inspired playful prints, and describes its customer as “culturally forward.”

The early collections were Indo-western. A FashionUnited report on a 400-square-foot store in Delhi’s Rajouri market, in September 2012, described traditional Indian motifs, fresh pastels and prints, and said the label was then sold through more than 180 points of sale, including shop-in-shops at Lifestyle, Pantaloons, Central and Shoppers Stop. By 2016 the same publication was describing Rajasthani cuts, colours and embellishments used on tops, kurtis and kurtas, to be worn with churidars, patialas, leggings or even shorts.

Stores, a runway and a new mark.

Growth came through exclusive stores. By October 2013 Global Desi had 48 standalone stores and a presence in 130 multi-brand outlets, and it had opened its first store outside India, at the Bagatelle Mall in Mauritius, FashionUnited reported. That year it also made its runway debut at Lakmé Fashion Week, with the actor Aditi Rao Hydari as showstopper. In May 2014 it opened its 62nd store, at Spark Mall in New Delhi, showing a Spring/Summer “Mela” collection of printed maxis, palazzo pants, crop tops and jumpsuits; in April 2014 it had opened a joint store with AND on New BEL Road in Bengaluru, its 60th exclusive outlet.

Collections took on travel themes. In December 2014 FashionUnited reported a “London Calling” line that mixed boho with sporty styles, drawn from London street style and shot in the city at places from the Tate to Portobello and Hyde Park; it included bomber jackets, culottes, dungarees and zip-up crop tops in blues, reds, purples and pinks. In February 2015 a second store opened in Mauritius, at Trianon Shopping Park, with separate sections for AND, Global Desi and the Anita Dongre label; Global Desi then had 78 exclusive outlets and a presence in 218 multi-brand stores in India, FashionUnited reported.

The 100th store followed in June 2016, at Orient Gateway Mall in Bengaluru, Retail4Growth reported; the label was then sold through more than 300 points of sale in 82 cities, counting its own outlets and large-format stores. Later that year Global Desi opened a 2,450-square-foot flagship in Mumbai and adopted a new logo and identity, FashionUnited reported in December 2016. The mark places a beak, drawn like an emoji, in the letter g; the publication likened it to a peacock strutting its style and said it was built around the idea of “voice your style.” The store paired forms drawn from traditional India with contemporary fittings.

Design and documentation.

Indian fashion and lifestyle brands tend to present themselves through what they make for particular moments. Ethnic-wear labels sort their ranges by garment, from kurtas, suit sets and sarees to sherwanis and lehengas, and by occasion, from festivals and office days to the separate ceremonies of a wedding. Western-wear and suiting labels lean instead on fabric, fit and the working week, and many companies now sell both kinds of clothing side by side.

Ownership is part of the story. Several names sit inside larger listed or private groups, such as Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, Vedant Fashions, TCNS Clothing and Raymond, while others remain founder-run or family-run companies that have taken outside investors. Corporate and investor pages are usually the plainest record of this: they set out founders, subsidiaries, stock-exchange listings and the dates on which a label was launched, bought or merged, and those pages are a sensible place to start when tracing who owns a brand today.

Visual identity is mostly carried by the stores and the campaigns rather than by published brand manuals. Exclusive brand outlets in malls and high streets, shop-in-shops in department stores, cricket sponsorships, cinema spots and celebrity ambassadors do much of the work, and a company’s logo is often seen first on a shopping bag, a jersey or a billboard. Colour palettes and typefaces are seldom documented in public.

This guide follows that record. It sets out founding dates, owners and listings as the companies and dated press reports give them, names collections and campaigns only where a source names them, and treats the colours and type shown here as an unofficial interpretation rather than a brand standard.

A g with a beak.

The company behind the label has changed shape twice. In 2015 AND Designs India Limited renamed itself House of Anita Dongre, English Wikipedia says. On 28 March 2019 its board transferred the AND and Global Desi businesses, by a slump sale, to a newly formed wholly owned subsidiary, Ochre and Black Private Limited, effective 1 April 2019, while the parent kept the Anita Dongre and Grassroot labels. Global Desi’s website now presents Ochre & Black as the company behind AND and Global Desi, and names Dongre as chairwoman and chief creative officer of the group.

The site groups Global Desi’s clothes into kurta sets, kurtas and tunics, co-ords and dresses, with bags, scarves and jewellery alongside. As of November 2026 it listed more than 123 points of sale in India, including 25 exclusive brand stores.

For a design guide, Global Desi shows how a print-led label can carry its personality into a single letter of its logo. Compare W, a Delhi women’s wear label now part of Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, and Biba, another Indian women’s wear label. For this guide we use a deep teal, a marigold and a fuchsia pink with a soft serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Global Desi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.