what happened to eShakti? an honest answer
a live website is not a functioning business.
The short answer
eShakti — for two decades the best-known name in affordable custom-sized women’s clothing — was widely reported to have effectively stopped fulfilling orders in early 2023. The website stayed online, which is exactly what made it so damaging: customers kept ordering from a store that, by every public indication, was no longer reliably shipping anything.
Three years on, its status remains murky, and the only responsible advice is: don’t order, and if you already did, act on your payment now. Here’s what’s actually documented — and where custom-fit shoppers have gone since.
See the eShakti alternatives →The timeline, as customers experienced it.
eShakti built a genuinely loved thing. Founded in the early 2000s, it offered made-to-order dresses in an enormous size range with customisable necklines, sleeves and hem lengths at fast-fashion-adjacent prices — and for years it largely delivered. For many women, especially beyond straight sizing, it was the first time online clothes shopping produced garments that fit.
From early 2023, the pattern changed. Customer reports across Reddit, review platforms and consumer complaint sites began describing the same sequence: order placed, payment taken, delivery date passed, then silence — no shipping updates, no email responses, no one answering phones.
Fashion media covering the collapse noted that the site remained live and browsable while checkout failed. The Curvy Fashionista’s April 2025 piece, Betrayed by eShakti: Orders Surprisingly Vanishing Into Thin Air, described shoppers filling carts only to be told the site couldn’t process payment “due to technical issuess” — the typo included — and characterised the company not as having flamed out in a going-out-of-business sale, but as having seemingly just stopped.
Later, a person identifying as a former employee publicly alleged unpaid debts to vendors and staff, and warned customers not to order. Reports have also circulated of a liquidation listing connected to an eShakti-related corporate entity. There has been no clear official statement from the company explaining any of it.
Since then: continuing complaint reports through 2024 and 2025, and occasional sightings of the site appearing “back online” with a browsable catalogue — followed by the same delivery complaints. As of 2026, the picture hasn’t meaningfully improved.
Is eShakti still in business?
The honest answer is that nobody outside the company can say definitively — and that ambiguity is itself the answer that matters. A live website is not a functioning business.
What can be said: there has been no credible public evidence of restored, reliable order fulfilment, no transparent communication from the company, and a years-long pattern of customers reporting paid orders that never arrived. Whatever eShakti technically is right now, it is not something to send money to. If you see the site accepting orders, treat that with the caution the record has earned.
I have an unfulfilled eShakti order — what do I do?
Act on the payment side, promptly:
Dispute the charge with your card provider or PayPal
Non-delivery of goods is a standard dispute category. Time limits apply — often measured from the transaction or the expected delivery date — so don’t wait out another round of silence before filing.
Keep your evidence
Order confirmation, payment record, any promised delivery date, and your unanswered messages. That’s the whole dispute file.
Don’t hold out for the order
Years of near-identical reports suggest the parcel is not the likely ending. The refund path is.
Never buy custom blind.
Here’s the uncomfortable part for the whole custom-clothing category, our corner of it included. eShakti’s customers had no visibility into making. Money went in, and a finished garment came out — until one day nothing came out, and there was no way to see why, or where any order actually stood, or whether anything was being made at all.
The website looked identical on the day everything worked and the day nothing did. That’s not an eShakti-specific flaw. It’s the default architecture of ordering custom clothing online, and it fails exactly when you need it not to.
It’s why we build every garment around per-garment evidence gates — photo verification at each stage of making, from fabric before cutting to finished measurements — so “where is my order” always has a visible, current answer. That system is described in full in our quality-control guide.
Whoever you buy custom from next, make this your test: can they show you your garment being made, or are you trusting a website that looks the same whether the workroom is full or empty?
Proof of making, not a promise
Where to go instead.
We keep a maintained, honest comparison of the current options — custom fit, design control, and visibility into making — in our eShakti alternatives guide, including where we think each option genuinely wins and where it doesn’t. Start there.
Frequently asked questions
git commit -m "show me the workroom"
Burned by an order that never came? Here’s the map.
The alternatives guide compares where custom-fit went after eShakti — and if you want the blunt version for your specific situation, ask us directly.