About us

Established in 2007 we are now 13 years in the business of designing, manufacturing and marketing furniture and home accessory products. As a boutique brand, we have achieved an extremely loyal following. A brand which is eternally on the look out for inspirations from everyday life, of travels, of unapologetic nostalgia. Each piece of furniture has a bit of a back story – a raison d’être so to speak. With influences that are as diverse as old classic movies, rock music, books, a colour, a building or even a flower. This is what makes our products so much more relatable and personal. They excude a warmth that is old-worldly at first glance but are thoroughly modern in their interpretations and executions.

At around the same time, when we launched PortsideCafe, our business grew with exports seeing an exponential leap in orders for our parent company Kish Handicrafts Private Ltd. from some of the best known stores & brands of the world. This experience has been invaluable and serves us well. It is reflected in the quality of our products and ethical practices we have adopted to achieve a certain level of professionalism required in designing, manufacturing and ultimately customer satisfaction in the field of furniture making.

“The Primary vision of PortsideCafe is to add zest to your home with the inclusion of well designed & crafted stand-alone pieces." Bobby Aggarwal

Bobby Aggarwal, an economics graduate, quit a career in advertising, manufacturing and designing footwear and organising rock concerts in his younger days to crafting bigger, more exciting things – furniture. He named the brand after the port town of Mumbai, where he first worked with leather and combined it with the unfulfilled dream of owning his own café.

Bobby’s love for leather and all its natural marks and blemishes add individual character to each piece of furniture he makes. He prides himself on achieving that weathered, “brought down from the attic” look that he has so distinctly managed to encapsulate in all his pieces.

The most distinct feature about Bobby’s design is that although “inspired”, it can never be categorised as belonging to a certain style or period. ” His sensibility shines through everything he designs, making almost everyone that walks into his shop smile.

There are two ways in which we want to approach the business of e-commerce.

By limiting and curating our vast product offering, we have picked up some of our best sellers (out of the 300 odd designs we have made over the years) in the initial stage. Of course you could buy any of the products from our original Portsidecafe.com website, but the difference is that whereas products available on Portsidecafeshop.com will feature some of our latest collections & will be ready to be dispatched in 6 weeks time, products available on Portsidecafe.com will take anywhere between 10-12 weeks and will have to be ordered offline.
Given that we want everyone of our customers to not only enjoy our products, we also want to give a delivery service which is of very high standards, we are limiting the number of cities in which we will be available in India in the first phase. This is to make sure that our customers will get our product delivered to their homes in perfect conditions. However, over the next few months we will be increasing not only our products offering but adding other cities as well, whenever we find suitable partners to deliver your precious purchases. We want to move in the “slow lane” of the digital world !

Ever since we launched at Anant Art Gallery in ‘Lado Sarai’, 13 years back, we have been through an interesting journey, to say the least, and along the way, learnt lessons through extreme hard work and dedication. Here I must quote another famous line –“No man is an island” to emphasise that all this would not have been possible if not for our excellent team of highly talented designers, Karigars and a dedicated team of administrators that our team comprises of, some of whom have been with us from the beginning. From a 4 man team we are now a 150 strong family.

Kudos to them!

Success for us is measured by how we’ve grown as a company which respects every individual who works for us. Its a 2 way street and we are lucky to be surrounded by people who embrace that ethos.

It has always been our endeavour to purchase raw materials as responsibly as possible, keeping in mind the impact they have on the environment. For this, we work very closely with tanneries which supply us the leather and approved vendors from whom we source timbers, plys and boards who have proper certifications that abide by laws against de-forestation. Most of our finishing materials are sourced from reputable companies with proven track records and whenever possible we use water-soluble stains and colouring agents. We also have the following:—

Vriksh certification — Our factory is Vriksh certified (A govt.recognized body)
UL licence — our factory is UL certified for lighting (portable and fixed) for exports to U.S.A.
CARB certification — We buy C.A.R.B certified plys and boards for the U.S.A markets
CTB standard (TB117) — All our upholstered furniture meet the California Technical Bulletin Standard (TB117) for flammability tests.
We have expanded our production facilities to maintain social distancing and follow all the SOP’s that are mandatory in this day and age. We also take hygiene and sanitization very seriously for the safety of all our workers and visitors.