A childhood spent among utensils, years spent listening to hoteliers, and one overlooked problem that became the idea for an entire company.
A hotel in central India once had to throw out an entire dinner set because of three broken plates.
Not because the rest of the set was damaged. Not because it had gone out of style. Simply because the manufacturer had discontinued that particular design, and there was no way to buy three replacement plates without buying eighty new ones.
Nilesh Sankhala heard some version of this story more times than he can count. Hotel owners, restaurant managers, catering companies — the details changed, but the complaint didn’t. And somewhere around the fiftieth time he heard it, he stopped treating it as an odd anecdote and started treating it as a business opportunity nobody else seemed to be chasing.
That instinct — to notice what an entire industry had quietly learned to live with — traces back much further than his years in hospitality supply. It goes back to a utensil shop in Chhuikhadan, a small town in Chhattisgarh, where Nilesh grew up in a Jain-Marwari trading family.
A Childhood Spent Watching, Not Playing
Most kids his age were outside after school. Nilesh was usually inside the shop, sitting among stacks of dinner sets and steel utensils, half-listening to his father negotiate with customers. He wasn’t being taught anything formally. He just absorbed it — the way a buyer’s tone changed when they trusted a shopkeeper, the way repeat customers behaved differently from one-time buyers, the small rituals that made a transaction feel safe.
His father had a line he repeated often, one that Nilesh still quotes today: “Business should run on trust and assurance, not on endless credit.” At the time it was just something dads say. Later, it became something closer to a founding principle.
When the family business expanded and moved to Raipur, the scale changed but the lesson didn’t. Wholesale distribution of dinnerware, glassware and houseware meant dealing with suppliers, transporters and retailers across several markets — and it gave Nilesh a much wider view of the same question he’d been quietly studying since childhood: what actually makes a customer come back?
Green Paris and the HORECA Opportunity
By the time India’s hotel and restaurant sector started booming, Nilesh had a good enough read on the market to spot where it was heading. Dining was becoming more visual. Hotels wanted their table settings to look consistent across hundreds of covers a night. Restaurants wanted crockery that photographed well and survived a Friday-night rush without chipping.
He responded by launching Green Paris under Nitmala Houseware — more than thirty melamine collections built specifically for the HORECA segment (hotels, restaurants and catering). It worked. Green Paris found its way into hospitality businesses across multiple states, and it gave Nilesh something he hadn’t quite expected: a direct line into the daily frustrations of the people actually running these operations.
The catering and wedding side of the market turned out to be its own world entirely. Caterers handling large weddings and banquet functions needed banquet tableware that could survive being packed, transported and unpacked hundreds of times in a single season — often moving through rental crockery suppliers, known locally as kiraya bhandar, who stock large volumes precisely for this kind of high-turnover event use. A single wedding season could put more wear on a collection than a restaurant would see in a year.
Those years of conversation, more than any market survey, became his real research.
Listening Instead of Selling
For four or five years, Nilesh made a habit of talking to hotel owners, restaurant operators, chefs and procurement staff — not to pitch them, but to understand what was actually going wrong on their end. The conversations rarely stayed on the topics he expected, like pricing or finish quality. They kept drifting toward the same unglamorous issue: what happens when a handful of plates break.
It sounds like a minor problem. In practice, it wasn’t. A broken plate here or there is routine wear and tear in any commercial kitchen. But if the original design had already been phased out — which happens constantly in tableware manufacturing — there was no way to buy just the missing pieces. The business was stuck buying an entirely new set, at full cost, to replace what amounted to a small fraction of it.
Everyone in the industry had simply absorbed this as the cost of doing business. Nilesh started asking why it had to be that way.
Designing for What Comes After the Sale
Luxerio grew directly out of that question. Instead of building another premium melamine tableware brand around new designs and seasonal collections, Nilesh wanted to build one around continuity — the idea that a tableware collection a hotel buys today should still be replaceable, piece by piece, years down the line.
Luxerio’s product philosophy covers the expected ground: food-grade melamine, commercial-grade durability, low-stain finishes, and designs built for hospitality rather than retail. But the piece that actually distinguishes it is the proposed Luxerio 7-Year Design & SKU Assurance Program — a commitment, subject to programme terms and manufacturing feasibility, to keep selected collections available to enrolled customers well after the original purchase. In effect, it treats replacement planning as part of the product itself, not an afterthought handled once a hotel’s procurement team calls in a complaint. The goal is simple: if three plates break, a business should be able to buy three plates.
Nilesh has a comparison he reaches for when explaining this to hospitality clients: think of premium tableware the way you’d think about jewellery. If one piece is damaged, nobody suggests replacing the whole collection — you replace the piece. He believes manufacturers should hold themselves to the same standard, and that responsibility for a product shouldn’t end the moment it leaves the warehouse. It’s a belief that’s now shaping other plans at Luxerio too, including upgrade programmes designed to help hospitality businesses move into newer collections over time, rather than starting from scratch.
Why the Plate Matters More Than It Looks
Ask Nilesh what a hotel is actually buying when it orders tableware, and he won’t say “plates.” He’ll say guest experience. A dish looks different depending on what it’s served on. A table setting shapes how a diner remembers the meal. None of that is really about the crockery itself — it’s about whether the hospitality business can trust its supplier to be there next year, and the year after.
That, to him, is the real product: reliability that a restaurant or hotel doesn’t have to think about.
Where This Goes Next
India’s hospitality sector isn’t slowing down — new restaurant chains, boutique hotels, cloud kitchens and catering businesses keep raising the bar on what “premium” even means. As that bar rises, Nilesh believes suppliers will be judged less on their catalogues and more on whether they can be counted on over time.
He doesn’t think of this as a radical idea. “Innovation isn’t always about inventing something new,” he says. “Sometimes it’s about noticing a problem everyone else stopped questioning.” For him, Luxerio isn’t a new tableware brand so much as an answer to a question he spent years hearing asked, in hotel kitchens and procurement offices across the country, long before he had a name for it.
As he puts it: “Products fill warehouses. Trust fills dining tables.”
