We recently connected with Vedant Kothari and have shared our conversation below.

Vedant, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

I wouldn’t say that I am a serial entrepreneur but I will say that I have started a few companies throughout the past few years, mainly focusing on the creative aspect of things..

Throughout life, I have always leaned on numbers.

I would never take any type of financial risk without having calculated, both the upside and downside and what the odds of both outcomes would be. I see what needs to be done for me to come out on the positive end of the stick. After all of this, I can proudly say all of these life lessons have flown straight out the window for me on my latest venture.

I changed my entire flow work structure, the day I decided to build Fallacie Apparel.
Not an asset-light, e-commerce brand. It’s not a company built in one country. It’s not a print-on-demand shit quality product brand and most importantly not a brand that’s designed for everyone.

I wanted to create something for Artists, made by Artists. Something that had the potential to create a solid dent in the industry.

On June 2022, I registered the first company under the name FALLACIE APPAREL LLP, in Mumbai, India, and over the next 12 months sunk every penny I had saved up until that point to create our first product.

On May 26th, 2023 we launched our first pop-up shop and the performance was abysmal. I remember feeling the sensation of regret. Partners and Team Members started having a loss of faith.

What had I spent the last 12 months of my life doing? Had I just lost everything? Has my Titanic already hit the Iceberg?

This brought us back to the drawing board, taking a step back. Evaluating mistakes, and finding out how we could rectify the mistakes I had made due to the the lack of experience I had in this industry. This changed my mindset, it changed me as a person. We created an entire online portal, made an online marketplace, and did research on certain intangibles that couldn’t be quantified in our demographic.

On 20th June 2023, We launched a pop store in a small cafe in the middle of nowhere.
And in a country where the daily minimum wage is $5.6 a day, we broke the $1000 of sales in 3 hours. It stood as a Proof of Concept of what we could achieve next.

That even now stands as our minimum benchmark for what we need to achieve at any pop-up shop, and we always beat it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My Name is Vedant Kothari.

To define myself in one statement, I would say that I am an Expendable Individual.
Most people I grew up with understood the phrase ” Jack of all trades, master of none”, I would like to believe that I have what it takes to go a step further. I understood it as “A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one”. That’s the original quote from William Shakespeare.

I think I say this because I have yet to dive deep into what Life could be.

I wear many hats.
I am a Creative Director, A Director of Photography, An Automotive Photographer, A Content Creator, A Strategist, and A Traveler.

My journey started in 2015 when I held a camera for the first time. Obviously, I didn’t know much either about cameras or about how deep the rabbit hole of knowing how to take a good photo could go.

What I did know is that I enjoyed the process of making something that I was passionate about.
Let that statement rest with you for a second, because soon I came to realize that that was a statement that could essentially be used in any field of life.

In 2017 I started my first business because I casually fell in love with what social media was at that time. I was passionate about finding out what scope of marketability for “influencers” existed at the time. I helped launch campaigns and helped multiple other smaller businesses grow as well as my own, through Covid I put off school as long as I could to grow this company as much as I could. And I did, we reached 6 figures in profit in the last quarter of 2020. This is where I learned my first lesson about the business world, “Innovate or Die”. As COVID-19 died out and ad rates began to triple, the client list vanished overnight. This project officially died on December 1st, 2020.

Throughout this journey, I began furthering my education through Film School, working on Content Creation, and with my free time, I would freelance for whichever client would hire me for photography work.

Using what learned about networking and branding so far, I started pushing the boundaries of reaching out to brands to find out if they would be interested in having their products or services. Which worked exceptionally in my favor landing long-term gigs with giants such as Marriott Hotels, Mercedes Benz, Taj, etc.

However, none of this stage of my life is what I would describe as the phase that provided me the least satisfaction through the work I had done. It felt as though the work was done to help fuel others. The business way of stating this would be that I was helping others grow their assets instead of working on creating my own.

This leads me to the latest chapter in my book. Fallacie Apparel.
I wanted to create something different and something that the market had yet to see. Something that drove me to get out of bed and work every day in the morning, without looking at the clock.

Fallacie as a company works in all directions. It helps to create employment for talented artists and provides the freedom to work in the direction that drives them. It makes sure that talented tailors and manufacturers based out of India aren’t oppressed by the behemoth of giants, which are the American conglomerates and helps us to support artists in dire need of saving.

I have worked with some amazing clients and I have been able to grow my social media following to a point where I couldn’t have even imagined yet I would say that.

“There isn’t anything else in life that makes me more proud than the work done by my team and me at Fallacie Apparel. ”

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

In a capitalist world, which is the one we live in. We start losing value for those pieces of art that aren’t marketable and that don’t directly add value to you.
We try to make the most money and spend the least.

In my opinion, the most important thing is to Recognize the Value of an Artist.

Artists are catalysts for innovation, constantly pushing boundaries and challenging norms. Their creativity not only fuels progress but also inspires innovation across various fields. Consider the automotive industry, where designers are akin to artists. Every technological advancement in cars, from aerodynamics to brakes and suspension, stems from the creative minds of these designers.

Every small piece of technology that you use in your car today, was created by an artist that designed it. Whether it be the aerodynamics the brakes or even the suspension. It was designed by an artist.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

There are certain NFT projects that I was given the offer to hop on board and be a part of. I declined all opportunities.

While a certain percentage of them were designed to straight-up SCAM people and be a rug pull, there were those that had good intentions.

However in an ever-changing world, one needs to fully understand the value of what is being created and for what purpose. I would say 98% of NFT owners and creators never really understood it. It was simply a quick money-making opportunity for them. I do believe that there is a long-term play with crypto currency and Web3.

However, it comes down to a simple thing.
In a capitalist world, which is the one we live in.
We start losing value for those pieces of art

Contact Info:

• Website: www.fallacie.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/pnikau
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@pnikau
• Other: www.pnikau.com

Image Credits
All of these were taken by Me. The singular photo of me was taken by a Los Angeles-based photographer. Edwin Santiago