Welcome to my profile. I am Priyank Goyal, a textile, apparel, retail, and analytics professional with long experience across textile manufacturing, Indian ethnic wear, apparel sourcing, retail buying, vendor development, merchandise planning, retail analytics, and knowledge documentation.
My work and learning have taken me through different sides of the textile and apparel world: the factory floor, the craft cluster, the vendor office, the buying table, the retail store, the classroom, and now the research space. This has helped me look at textiles not only as fabrics or products, but as a combination of material, technique, culture, commerce, technology, and human skill.
Academic Background
My academic journey has been diverse and multidisciplinary. I hold a B.Tech. in Textile Technology from TIT, Bhiwani, Master’s in Fashion Management from NIFT, New Delhi, a Master’s in Computer Applications from Guru Jambheshwar University, Hisar, and a three-year Post Graduate Diploma in Personnel Management from Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management Development Studies.
I have also completed the Business Analytics and Intelligence programme from IIM Bangalore, which strengthened my interest in data-driven decision-making, analytics, structured problem solving, and the use of quantitative methods in business.
Professional Experience
Over the years, I have worked in textile manufacturing, apparel sourcing, Indian ethnic apparel retail, vendor development, merchandise planning, and retail performance analysis. My professional experience has given me the opportunity to work closely with manufacturers, vendors, buyers, merchandisers, retail teams, and craft-based suppliers.
A significant part of my career has been connected with Indian ethnic wear and traditional textiles. This has helped me understand the practical realities behind product development, sourcing, assortment building, pricing, delivery planning, quality expectations, and retail performance.
Buying, Sourcing and Retail Experience
My buying and sourcing experience has helped me understand textiles as products that must finally work in the marketplace. A fabric or garment may be beautiful in itself, but in retail it must also connect with customer preference, regional demand, price point, occasion, season, size, colour, design language, and store performance.
Working with vendors and retail teams has taught me that good buying decisions require more than taste. They require a balance of craft understanding, commercial judgement, vendor capability, product timing, cost awareness, data analysis, and customer insight.
This practical retail experience continues to influence the way I study and write about textiles. I often look at a textile not only from the point of view of its structure or history, but also from the point of view of its use, saleability, production feasibility, customer appeal, and long-term relevance.
Textile and Craft Cluster Exposure
My work has allowed me to visit and interact with several handloom, powerloom, printing, dyeing, finishing, and apparel production clusters across India. These visits have given me the opportunity to observe textile processes at close quarters and to learn from artisans, weavers, printers, processors, manufacturers, traders, and vendors.
These field experiences have shaped my belief that textile knowledge cannot be understood only from books. It must also be understood through people, tools, looms, materials, production constraints, market demands, local vocabulary, and lived practice.
Indian traditional textiles are not merely historical objects. They are living systems of knowledge, skill, adaptation, and commerce. This understanding continues to guide my interest in documenting and explaining textile traditions.
Research and Academic Interests
My current research interests include Indian traditional textiles, saree classification, textile image analysis, machine learning, deep learning, graph-based learning, and the use of artificial intelligence for understanding textile provenance and visual features.
My doctoral research explores the classification of traditional saree images using deep learning and related computational methods. Through this work, I am interested in understanding how modern technology can support textile documentation, craft identification, visual classification, knowledge preservation, and retail decision-making.
I am particularly interested in the space where textile knowledge, visual culture, artificial intelligence, and business application meet. For me, this is an exciting area because it allows traditional textile understanding to be studied with new tools while still respecting the complexity of craft, region, material, and human skill.
Writing and Knowledge Sharing
I started My Textile Notes as a personal learning and documentation space. Over time, it has grown into a public textile knowledge archive for students, researchers, designers, merchandisers, textile professionals, and anyone curious about textiles.
The blog reflects my attempt to explain textile concepts in a simple and accessible way. I try to connect technical textile knowledge with Indian textile traditions, industry practice, retail understanding, and academic curiosity.
Over the years, My Textile Notes has received millions of visits and has also been referred to in academic and institutional contexts. I see this as a responsibility to keep improving the clarity, accuracy, structure, and usefulness of the material shared here.
What This Blog Tries to Do
Through this blog, I try to document and explain textile knowledge in a way that is useful to both beginners and serious learners. Some posts are technical, some are historical, some are practical, and some are exploratory. The common aim is to make textile knowledge more accessible.
I believe that textiles deserve to be understood not only as beautiful products, but also as systems of fibre, yarn, structure, process, design, labour, technology, culture, and market behaviour.
If this blog helps a student understand a difficult concept, helps a merchandiser identify a fabric, helps a researcher trace a textile term, helps a designer appreciate a technique, or helps a reader become more curious about Indian textiles, then it has served its purpose.
Contact
You may reach me through the contact details provided on this blog.
Thank you for visiting my profile. I hope the material shared here helps you explore textiles, apparel, retail, and Indian craft traditions with greater curiosity and clarity.
P.S. The picture above was taken many years ago. I have grown older since then, but thankfully, my curiosity about textiles has only grown stronger. :)
