Rakhee Chopra, owner of a fashion design company that specializes in clothes for curvy women: “When you get out of your comfort zone, that’s when your growth happens”

Rakhee Chopra arrived in Canada at 24-years-old, just married to a man she had just met. It was St. Patrick’s Day, 2005. The newlyweds moved into her in-laws’ home in St. Catharines, as expected.
Before that, Rakhee had been managing a call centre – and designing clothes on the side – in Bombay, India where she had been born and raised. But in the past 14 years, Rakhee has completely rebuilt her life, to fulfill her dream of creating clothing designed for curvy women and start a social media movement called #empoweryourcurves.
“I just said, ‘this is it,’” she recalls. “I said ‘there are people out there who need what I do.’ I make clothes for myself. I’m curvy and I can’t find clothes for myself here or in India.  And I started sewing for people again.”
Now the owner of a growing Canadian fashion company (www.Rakheechopra.com), Rakhee is also a community builder. She does fashion shows to raise money for Anova London – an agency, she feels “deeply connected to,” because she has been abused in her past – and has volunteered with the London Lesbian Film Festival and Clothing Works.
She started designing and sewing her own clothes when she was only nine-years-old. “I couldn’t find anything for myself. I used to make stuff for curvy women there too,” she says.
She was still doing that on the side of her call-centre job back in India before she immigrated to Canada with her then-husband. After a short time with his “very traditional” parents, the couple moved out and lived in several southwest Ontario cities until they bought a home in London in 2007 and adopted their children.
Life was busy, as it is with children, and Rakhee got a job working retail, but she made time to sew her own clothes, because she couldn’t find anything that felt right for her curvy body.
“I wore men’s clothes at the time,” she says. “In Canada, I wanted to see clothes for myself.”
Then, after a fall from a ladder, she made up her mind to start her own business. For someone who was new to Canada, that meant she had to work hard to meet people and network.
“It felt like putting a mask on sometimes,” she recalls. “I was always telling myself ‘this is for my girls and the other women too who want to look great.’” And she did it. When you get out of your comfort zone, that’s when your growth happens,” she says. 
It wasn’t always easy. She says she lost the support of some friends when she came out as gay.
But she was true to herself and found others, as well as a loyal following for her business. She now has 30 regular clients and has hired an assistant designer and a virtual assistant. She is hiring again, with plans to move into a booth at the Western Fair Farmer’s Market. She aims to be a zero-waste company and donates scraps to a local charity.
And she will continue to support the people and causes that are close to her heart in London, she says.
“London never felt like a city,” she says “Always more like a community to me.”

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