Priya and Mohit Gadhiya Started Raja Rani Coaching With a Small Stitching Setup. Today, Lakhs Learn From Them

There was a time when learning to stitch in India usually meant sitting beside someone who already knew the craft and slowly picking it up by watching them.

The skill was everywhere, but structured education around it was not.

In Surat, Priya and Mohit Gadhiya saw that gap differently. What began as a small stitching initiative eventually became Raja Rani Coaching, an online and offline fashion and skill-education platform that now serves learners across India.

Their journey is not simply about turning tailoring into a business. It is about taking a skill that has traditionally been taught informally and building an organised learning ecosystem around it.

Before Raja Rani Coaching, There Was Raja Rani Couture

The story of Raja Rani did not begin with an online academy.

Priya and Mohit had already entered the fashion world through Raja Rani Couture, which began as a home-based venture focused on outfit designing and rental services. The company’s own timeline traces its beginnings to 2014, followed by the launch of a studio in Surat in 2016 and further expansion over the next few years.

Both Priya and Mohit had studied fashion design at the International Institute of Fashion Design in Surat, and their experience in the industry helped them notice something that was difficult to ignore.

Tailoring was a massive skill-based industry, but the way people learned it was often fragmented, informal and dependent on individual teachers.

The couple believed there was room to make that education more structured and accessible.

Then Came 2020, and a Small Classroom Became Something Bigger

In 2020, Raja Rani Coaching began its stitching classes in Surat.

The company’s current account says the coaching started with just two students, with offline practical classes initially growing through word of mouth. What began locally soon started attracting attention beyond the classroom.

Then the pandemic changed the way education was delivered.

Instead of allowing geography to remain a limitation, Priya and Mohit moved their teaching online. They began conducting classes through WhatsApp video calls and later Zoom, opening the possibility of learning stitching from home for students who could not physically travel to Surat.

That decision changed the scale of the business.

By 2022, the company says more than 4,000 students had learned stitching online, and by 2023, that number had grown to more than 30,000 online stitching students. An app was also launched to create a more structured digital learning experience.

They Were Not Just Teaching People How to Stitch

The more interesting part of Raja Rani Coaching is what happened after the basic skill.

The platform expanded beyond simple stitching lessons into fashion designing, garment construction, pattern making and other practical areas of the fashion business. Its current course ecosystem also includes training for people interested in starting or developing their own boutique and fashion-related businesses.

That distinction matters.

Teaching someone how to operate a sewing machine gives them a skill.

Teaching them how to turn that skill into a product, understand fashion, build professional capabilities and potentially create a business gives the skill an economic pathway.

This is the philosophy that Raja Rani has built its education model around, with the company describing its mission in terms of skill development, financial independence and career opportunities.

From a Local Stitching Class to Lakhs of Learners

The scale of the platform today is very different from where it started.

Forbes reported in 2025 that Raja Rani Coaching had trained more than 100,000 students and had built a social-media audience of more than three million Instagram followers at the time of its profile.

The company’s current website reports an even larger learner base, claiming 3 lakh+ students, while its founder profile describes the platform as serving more than 3.5 lakh learners. These are company-reported figures and have not been independently audited in the sources reviewed.

The numbers illustrate how dramatically the model has expanded.

What once required a physical classroom can now reach someone sitting at home in another city, learning through an app, online class or workshop.

Shark Tank Put the Story on a Much Bigger Stage

In 2023, Raja Rani Coaching appeared on Shark Tank India Season 3, bringing the husband-and-wife founders and their vision for organised tailoring education to a national television audience.

According to the show’s official listing, Priya and Mohit presented their business as an attempt to address the fragmented nature of India’s tailoring industry and sought ₹1.3 crore for 5% equity.

The appearance also highlighted something important about their business model.

They were not pitching just another fashion brand.

They were building an education platform around a skill that already existed in millions of Indian households but had historically lacked standardised, accessible training infrastructure.

The Bigger Idea Is Not About Sewing

There is a tendency to look at tailoring as a small household skill.

But a sewing machine can be much more than that.

For a homemaker, it can become an additional income source. For a young learner, it can become the beginning of a fashion career. For someone with entrepreneurial ambition, it can become the first tool in a boutique business.

That is why the story of Raja Rani Coaching extends beyond fashion education.

It is about converting skill into opportunity.

And when that education becomes accessible online, the distance between a person who has a skill and a person who can potentially build something with that skill becomes considerably smaller.

From Two Students to a National Skill-Education Platform

Today, Raja Rani Coaching describes itself as a national skill-education platform, offering more than 140 courses and products and serving learners through digital and offline channels. The company also says its app has crossed five lakh downloads.

The exact numbers may continue to change as the platform grows, but the fundamental transformation remains clear.

Priya and Mohit did not invent stitching.

They did something arguably more difficult: they took an old, widely available skill and built a modern education system around it.

The Savage Humans Take

The most powerful part of Priya and Mohit Gadhiya’s story is not how large Raja Rani Coaching has become.

It is where they started.

A skill that millions of Indians already possessed became the foundation for a platform that could teach that same skill to millions more, while connecting it with fashion, entrepreneurship and economic opportunity.

Sometimes, building something meaningful does not require discovering a completely new idea.

Sometimes, it means looking at something ordinary, understanding the problem around it, and asking what would happen if people were given a better way to learn.

A sewing machine may look like a simple tool, but in the hands of someone who knows how to turn skill into opportunity, it can become the first step toward independence.