There are 35 million Indians living outside India. They celebrate their festivals with the same devotion. They cook their grandmother’s recipes on Sunday afternoons. They dress in ethnic wear for weddings that happen in cities their parents have never visited. And for a very long time, they have done all of this with very little help from brands that truly understood them. Vivek decided to build those brands.
Vivek Manoharan is the founder of Ethnic Tree, a direct-to-consumer Indian ethnic fashion brand serving buyers across 130+ countries. The brand operates two platforms: ethnictree.com for its global audience and ethnictree.in for domestic Indian buyers. In the six years since its founding, Ethnic Tree has grown from a simple idea — that the global Indian diaspora deserved access to beautiful, authentic ethnic wear.
The startup journey has not been straightforward. Vivek was deeply hands-on from day one — managing Meta ad strategy, overseeing product copy, obsessing over the mobile conversion experience, and personally reviewing the quality of every customer touchpoint. He is the kind of founder who runs Microsoft Clarity sessions on his own website and then rewrites the cart checkout copy the same afternoon. The kind who builds BOGO pricing models in Excel before briefing the developer. The kind who does not wait for an agency to tell him his mobile page speed is hurting his conversions — he finds it himself and fixes it.
I started Ethnic Tree because I believed that Indian ethnic fashion deserved a modern, global brand built around it. Not just a store, but a brand with a story and a standard – Vivek Manoharan
The market insight behind Ethnic Tree is clear. The Indian diaspora is one of the most affluent and culturally connected diaspora communities in the world. They are digitally sophisticated, they have high purchase intent around cultural occasions, and they are deeply undeserved by existing fashion brands that either treat ethnic wear as a niche or fail to build the international delivery infrastructure to serve them reliably. Ethnic Tree is purpose-built for this gap.
But Vivek’s ambition did not stop at fashion. The same diaspora that needs ethnic wear also needs access to authentic Indian food — the spices, lentils, flours, and grocery staples that make it possible to cook the meals they grew up with, anywhere in the world. That insight led to the creation of a second brand: Village Masala, an international Indian grocery platform co-founded with his wife Keerthika Vivek, now carrying over 280+ products across nine categories and shipping to Indian diaspora families globally.
Together, Ethnic Tree and Village Masala represent something more than two e-commerce businesses. They represent a thesis: that the global Indian diaspora is a distinct, underserved, and deeply valuable consumer community — one that deserves brands built specifically for its needs, its occasions, and its identity.
Vivek Manoharan is building both brands simultaneously — managing the operational complexity with a lean team, an external SEO agency, and a direct-involvement approach to marketing that most founders his size have already delegated away. He has not raised institutional capital. He has not chased growth at the expense of brand. He has built slowly, carefully, and with conviction.
In the startup world, the loudest stories tend to get told first. Vivek Manoharan’s story is quieter. It is the story of a founder who identified two real problems affecting real people, built real solutions for them, and is growing two real businesses — one ethnic outfit and one bag of masala at a time.
Ethnic Tree: ethnictree.com | Village Masala: villagemasala.com
