10+ years leading fashion and kidswear design end-to-end — from trend forecasting to the sample rack to the sales dashboard. Now expanding into digital product design with a PG from IIT Roorkee, bringing the same systems thinking to UX.
Owned end-to-end design calendar execution and product development for kidswear, aligning trend research with commercial targets across every drop.
Rebuilt trims, sourcing and vendor coordination workflows to keep full-price sell-through consistently high, season after season.
Designed high-value youth fashion and licensing-brand collections in Dubai, grounded in dedicated Gen Z research-to-market studies run separately for young men and young women — translating generational insight into product stories with strong customer loyalty.
Not just the outcome — the actual mechanics of how design decisions moved the business.
When I took over the kidswear design calendar, drops were reactive — designed close to season, with limited lead time for trend validation or vendor negotiation. The fix wasn't more designers, it was a rebuilt operating rhythm: trend validation locked 6 months out, design freeze dates enforced across every category, and a shared calendar that merchandising, sourcing and marketing all worked off — instead of design finding out about deadlines after the fact.
Sell-through is a lagging indicator of a lot of upstream decisions — trims, sourcing lead times, and how tightly a print or license is matched to what's actually validated in trend research. I rebuilt the vendor coordination and trims-sourcing workflow so fewer SKUs needed markdown to move, season after season.
Figures reflect representative performance trends from my role at Reliance Trends; exact confidential business metrics are approximated for portfolio purposes.
SaaS gives you a tool that waits for input — you still do the thinking and the doing inside it. AI does a first pass of the doing itself, on the small, repeatable parts of the job, so I spend more of my week on judgment calls instead of execution.
Try it — Trend Brief Generator, live →A structured space I still have to fill — I open Asana, I build the calendar row by row, I write the brief.
A first draft arrives already done — I edit, approve, and redirect, instead of starting from a blank page.
40+ reference images condensed into a structured brief the team can act on same-day.
First-draft garment descriptions and construction notes generated from sketches and references.
Bestsellers and laggards auto-flagged from raw sell-through sheets, no manual pivot tables.
First-draft coordination emails and status updates, edited and sent rather than written from scratch.
Review call discussions converted straight into a trackable task list for the team, same meeting.
Season critical-path structure auto-drafted from prior season patterns, then adjusted by hand.
Figures are illustrative estimates of time reclaimed, not audited metrics.
Every category I design follows the same anatomy — palette, fabric, and silhouette locked before a single graphic gets drawn. Recreated here in generic form across the categories I work in, to show the method rather than any one confidential deck.
Simple shapes and honest fabrics aren't the boring part of the range — they're what a customer buys again without thinking twice. Get basics right and they quietly become the highest-margin, highest-repeat category in the store.
This is the category a customer reaches for every single day, which makes it the trust-builder for the whole brand. Get it right and it drives footfall and repeat visits well beyond its own sales line, lifting everything sold alongside it.
This is the bread and butter of the brand — the core design strategy the rest of the range is built around. It carries the brand's identity most visibly, and it's what a store leads with when it needs to sell with confidence.
*Illustrative figures reflecting general category dynamics in kidswear retail, not confidential company data.
From formalwear to kidswear to digital product — the throughline is always systems behind the aesthetics.
Lead end-to-end design calendar execution and product development. Mentor a cross-functional team, drive quarterly special projects, and manage vendor coordination, sampling, trims and sourcing.
Designed high-value fashion collections for youth men/women and licensing brands; conducted market research and built customer loyalty through high-street aligned styling.
Conceptualized men's athleisurewear — graphics, tech packs and fabric stories for seasonal drops.
Coordinated with merchandising and production teams to roll out trend-aligned lines.
Created graphic-driven apparel for a fast-growing digital fashion brand, delivering high-performing SKUs through pop culture and visual storytelling.
Designed business and lifestyle formals including suits, shirts and trousers.
IIT Roorkee
NIFT Hyderabad
Six things I own in parallel, every season. Tap through to see how each one runs.
Every collection starts months out — reading trend services, competitor sets, and consumer signal before a single sketch happens. Recent work: Street Vibes SS26 (skate culture, retro-comic and NASA-inspired graphics for KBTS 2-8 Boys) and Future Trends AW26, a three-story seasonal roadmap — Timeless Varsity, Fast Lane Club, and Outland Boys — each built with full trend validation, Pantone palettes, key fabrics and license mapping.
Color, silhouette, fabric direction pulled from forecasting services and competitor releases — e.g. tracking the 68% rise in TikTok F1 views to justify a motorsport-led buy strategy for Fast Lane Club.
Voice-of-customer, returns feedback and social listening folded into the seasonal brief, validated against category-level buying strategies.
Full trend decks per story — overview, moodboard, colour palette, graphics/print techniques, license options and key fabrics — turning references into a brief the whole team designs against.
Line planning, product innovation and sampling — where the ideas meet fabric, cost, and a factory calendar. The AW26 Varsity line for KBTS spans 60+ SKUs across tees, polos, shirts, sets, jeans, shorts and trackpants — each style spec'd down to fabric composition, print technique and price tier (₹499 essentials to ₹799 outerwear).
Architecting the collection across category, price tier, and silhouette mix — 60+ SKUs tiered from Fashion Essentials (₹499–699) to Fashion 799 outerwear.
New print/embellishment techniques pushed into range — non-PVC embroidery, HD prints, chenille appliqué, and interactive applique details.
Tech packs, fit sessions, and revisions managed through to sample approval, documented style-by-style in the linesheet.
Sourced and mapped seasonal licensing collaborations spanning major global entertainment and gaming IP, matched to validated trend stories each season.
Sell-through, returns, and margin data reviewed before design decisions get locked, not after.
Bestseller and laggard analysis feeding directly into next season's line plan.
Return-reason data used to fix recurring fit or quality issues at the source.
Closing the loop — what sold, why, and what carries forward to the next collection.
Keeping design, merchandising, production and marketing pulling in the same direction, on the same calendar.
Regular syncs across merchandising, production and marketing to keep the collection story consistent.
Sampling feasibility and production timelines negotiated directly with manufacturing partners.
Building the case for the collection and getting stakeholder buy-in before go-ahead.
Weekly, monthly and seasonal milestones, and a team that knows exactly what's due and when.
Critical-path milestones mapped from concept to delivery, season over season.
Workload distribution, mentoring, and keeping a design team unblocked.
A single source of truth for what's due, who owns it, and what's at risk.
A design career runs on more than design software — here's the full system, mapped to what it's actually for.
Illustrator, Figma and a PLM system for tech packs and sample tracking.
Asana or Notion for calendars, Slack for the day-to-day coordination noise.
Looker or Sheets to keep the design brief honest against real sales numbers.
Placeholder tools grouped by what they're actually for — swap in your real stack.
Long-distance runner competing in ultras and marathons · Tabla player · Published author, showcased at major book fairs
"Nitesh has good articulation of concepts, and has fresher ideas whenever the team is stuck. The design-led solutions provided by him have helped our brand in many ways — one of the best things he can bring to the table is brand building, which can drive the business in a newer direction. What's new with Nitesh is the AI-led solutions, only possible with an understanding of different software and platforms."
"If there's a short notice and we need collections, design, solutions — we rush to Nitesh for the timely responses."