Adaa Bazaar is a boutique in Greater Noida. We sell handwoven and hand-finished ethnic wear — sarees, lehengas, kurta sets, suits and dupattas — and most of what we sell is stitched in our own workroom at Jagat Farm.
It started at home
Shaista was born and brought up in Bulandshahr, a small city in western Uttar Pradesh. Her working life began in offices rather than in cloth: administration and sales, first for hospitality companies and later for real estate firms.
She moved to Greater Noida in 2015, after her marriage, and started stitching for people almost immediately, in the hours a full-time job left her, for whoever asked. Her first child was born in 2016 and her second in 2018. By then it had stopped being a favour done for friends and become a boutique, run out of the house, with no shop and no signboard.
She had no investor and no plan beyond the next order. What she would not do was send out a garment she would not have worn herself.
2020
By 2019 the orders had outgrown the house. Then the pandemic arrived and shops around the country began closing for good.
Shaista signed for a space in Jagat Farm Market that year and opened with one stitching machine. Her younger sister Shahin came to help her run it, and has been there every day since.
Three of us run it
Shahin has been part of Adaa Bazaar since the day the shop opened. She runs everything that happens inside it: the customers who walk in, the fittings, the workroom and what goes on the rail. If you have been to the shop, you have met her.
Shaista buys the cloth, decides what gets made and checks the pieces before they leave. She also runs the online side of the business.
Aftab is Shaista's husband. He works in software at a multinational and has never left that job. When the children were small he moved to working from home so that he could be there for them, which is a large part of why the boutique had any hours at all. The website you are reading, the systems behind it and the way customers find us are his work, done in evenings and at weekends.
None of the three of them did this instead of something else. They did it on top of everything else, for ten years.
Where it has got to
The one machine is a workroom now, with a team in it. Adaa Bazaar has become one of the places people across Delhi NCR come to when the occasion matters and the garment has to be right.
We went online in 2022, and the shop stopped being limited by how far somebody was willing to drive. Since then we have sent thousands of orders across India, and to the US, the UK and the Gulf.
The way we work has not changed much since the kitchen table. Somebody looks at every piece before it leaves the shop, and more often than not that is still Shaista.
