The Mahjong Method: What an Ancient Chinese Tile Game Taught Me About Building a Fashion Business

A few weeks ago, I became mildly obsessed with Mahjong.

A traditional game that originated in China, Mahjong is a tile-based game typically played by four people around a table. Each player draws and discards tiles, working towards a winning combination. Think of it as somewhere between rummy and chess, with a lot more going on beneath the surface. It's been around for centuries, and it's deeply strategic. I didn't pick it up with any particular intention. But somewhere along the way, I noticed that the time I was spending on it was pulling me back to work, feeling sharper and more deliberate. And once I started paying attention to why, the parallels to fashion were hard to ignore.

Learning the game felt like learning the industry

My first experience with Mahjong was pure, glorious confusion. New terms. New logic. New conventions, and not just one set, because every country plays by its own rules. Japanese Riichi Mahjong plays nothing like American Mahjong, which plays nothing like Taiwanese-style. The teaching methods are scattered, the jargon is dense, and no one waits for you to catch up before the next tile drops.

Fashion is exactly the same. When I started out in retail and design, the industry didn't hand me a rulebook; it handed me a pile of mismatched pieces and asked me to figure out the picture. Global fashion weeks run on different calendars. Collection planning varies by market. You pick up the pieces as they come and build the puzzle yourself.

The parallel was sharp enough to make me laugh.

Reading the table

In Mahjong, there's a move called the Charleston, a mandatory tile exchange with every other player at the start of the game. What you receive tells you something. What people send away tells you more. Together, they sketch out what everyone might be building and what they don't need.

Once I started doing this in Mahjong, I realised I'd been running a version of it at SatatKi for years.

Reading the table in business looks like digging into client data, absorbing trend reports, and paying close attention to what global buyers are and aren't picking up. Knowing what a retailer is looking for before the conversation begins. Understanding which colour story or price architecture to anchor a collection around. Done well, it improves decision-making, and it shortens the time between a good idea and a commercial result.

The art of letting go

The part of Mahjong that took me longest to internalise: the game isn't won by collecting everything. It's won by knowing what to let go. Every tile you hold is a tile you're betting on, and the longer you hold the wrong one, the more it costs you. You're carrying dead weight and blocking yourself from building something that could actually win.

Fashion works the same way, though it takes longer to learn. Early on, you say yes to a lot because the opportunity feels like validation. But at some point, you realise that not everything that looks like an opportunity fits the hand you're building. Holding on out of hope, politeness, or FOMO is what keeps you from finishing the game.

At SatatKi, the discards have been deliberate. Brands with short-term thinking. Partnerships where the interests were misaligned. Collaborations built on one-time transactions. The pull of D2C and marketplace models, which work well for many businesses, but would have pulled us away from the consulting, the systems, and the strategic groundwork that sits underneath a brand's commercial life.

Winning in fashion, like winning in Mahjong, rarely looks spectacular from the outside. It looks like a brand that's still standing, still relevant, still building, because somewhere along the way, someone made the quiet decision to let go of what wasn't working.

The slow seasons

Every Mahjong game has stretches where you're not making your big move. You're watching, recalibrating, waiting.

Fashion businesses have those stretches too, and from the outside, it looks like nothing is happening. From the inside, it's where a lot of work gets done.

During slower seasons at SatatKi, we're rebuilding, upgrading how we show up on platforms, relaunching the blog, rewriting client stories, integrating new tools, and deepening skills. What you do with your time when business is slow shapes what the business becomes. The returns on those quieter investments are slow and compounding, and mostly invisible until they aren't.

I've grown to genuinely look forward to these seasons. They feel like the part of the game where you quietly assemble a good hand.

Timing is about sequence, and not speed

One of the persistent myths in fashion is that the advantage goes to whoever moves fastest. In practice, it goes to whoever understands the sequence.

I work backwards from deadlines, in years, then months, then weeks, then days. The timeline keeps you focused on what's actually necessary. When you know where you're headed and roughly when you need to arrive, every smaller decision becomes easier to evaluate. Should this silhouette go into the next collection or the one after? Is the market timing right to enter a new category? The answers get sharper when you're working from a map.

Summers in India, for instance, are almost always a solid runway for Indian brands; we naturally work in cottons, linens, and tropical-weight fabrics. That's sequence thinking

in practice. Understanding when is as strategic as understanding what.

The structure underneath

Mahjong runs on an elegant internal system: three suits, three colours, a fixed number of tiles per suit, and a small set of special high-value pieces that can significantly shift the game. Every tile has a role, and a strong hand depends on how they work together.

Collections work on a similar logic.

Bestsellers are your core tiles: reliable, repeatable, commercially steady. The pieces that sell season after season, that retail teams depend on, that keep the commercial engine running. They may not be the most exciting designs in the range, but they're the reason everything else exists.

Statement pieces and showstoppers are your special tiles. In a collection, these are the designs that open a lookbook, anchor a campaign, or walk a runway. They are built to be seen and talked about rather than to sell in volume. Their job is to carry the identity of the whole range, to tell the world what a brand stands for. Rarer, higher value, and capable of changing the shape of the game when played at the right moment.

PR pieces sit in a similar space. Designs that go to press, to stylists, to the right people in the right rooms. They may never see a retail floor in large numbers, but they shape perception in ways that quietly influence everything else that sells.

The rule of three shows up here, too. Three key fabrics, three dominant colour directions, three silhouette families. The constraint creates coherence. Mahjong works because of its limits, and a well-edited collection tends to as well.

Luck, and what runs alongside it

Visibility has always been a luck-adjacent factor for us. We're not on the consumer end of the business; there's no product a customer stumbles across. Being B2B means you actively negotiate for attention rather than having it arrive naturally.

What I've learned, though, is that luck has a preparation requirement. If we're not at the forums, the events, the platforms, the relevant conversations, we're just not findable. Consistently showing up, sharing perspective, being present in the right spaces, that's what makes luck a realistic possibility rather than a wishful one.

The tile you've been waiting for tends to find you if you're still at the table.

The tile you've been holding

The most satisfying moment in Mahjong is playing the tile you've been sitting on for several rounds. The one you sensed was right before the moment arrived. When it finally fits, there's no drama, just a quiet click of recognition.

Fashion has given me a few of those.

When SatatKi started, consulting within the Indian fashion business wasn't really a defined category. "Designed in India" as a commercial identity wasn't something people were actively building strategies around. We held those tiles for a while. We played them when the table was ready.

Staying in the game long enough to know when that's what longevity actually feels like.