How He Built a ₹1,000Cr Brand Without Falling Into the Overfunding Trap | Sidhant Keshwani, Libas

Libas has a team whose only job is to make things take less time

Sidhant Keshwani bootstrapped Libas for a decade before taking outside money. His operating thesis is one word, and he has built an internal function around it.

If a process at Libas takes three or four days, it gets handed to the speed team, whose brief is to get it down to hours. That has been applied to everything from first design to a returned garment going back on sale, and Sidhant says some end-to-end cycles are 70 to 80% faster than when they started.

It sounds like a slogan until you see what it buys. Libas launches roughly 150 styles a week, so getting a trend to design faster, to market faster and into replenishment faster is the entire business. By the time a competitor copies a design, he wants to have moved on.

"Speed will always supersede perfection."

Bootstrapped for a decade, on purpose

The first five years ran on a team of about 20 people, and Libas did its first ₹100 crore of revenue with that team. Sidhant is direct that overfunding kills companies, and that he learned corporate governance by being the HR person, the finance person and the warehouse person himself. Today he has a full CXO layer, and he knows what to expect from each of them because he has run every department.

The company crossed ₹500 crore in FY24 before taking any external capital, then raised ₹150 crore from IAF Series 5, a fund managed by ICICI Venture, alongside his father and co-founder Sunil Keshwani, who runs supply chain. His rule: raise to accelerate a model that already works, not to go looking for product-market fit.

Small batches, and a 48-hour verdict

First order quantities are deliberately tiny, which caps the downside on a design that misses and means almost everything sells through. The risk is the opposite one: under-buying something that turns out to be a hit.

So they compressed the detection window. Identifying a top seller used to take 15 to 20 days, because you gave a style a weekend to breathe. Now a style goes live and within 48 hours they have views, clicks and conversion feeding an algorithm that predicts six-month volume at around 90% accuracy, and replenishment starts inside 48 to 72 hours.

Returns are not a moral problem

Libas has been number one on marketplaces for a decade without dropping to number two for a single month, and returns come with that. Sidhant is unsentimental about it: the ecosystem has made returning so easy that customers order four outfits for one function and send three back. Six-month projects to reduce the rate move it by a quarter or half a percentage point.

So the fix is speed again. Between 97 and 98% of returns go back up for sale within 48 hours, with a refurbishment cycle of 48 to 72 hours for damaged pieces. As long as returned stock isn’t dead capital, he doesn’t mind it.

The fraud is a separate line item they simply cost in. His favourite example: someone unpicked a Libas label with a sewing machine, stitched it into a ten-year-old t-shirt, and returned that.

Building the opposite of a traditional store

Online, Libas had no real competition. Offline, every market has one. Go to South Extension and there are ten competitors, one of them the local king whose families have shopped with him for sixty years and who knows the local flavour better than any national brand can.

Libas visited fifteen or twenty traditional stores and decided to do the exact opposite of all of them. No high ceilings, no gold, no big billing table with tea and coffee. Fresher, younger, closer to a western-wear store in feel. The logic is that if you win women between 18 and 30, they bring their mothers with them, whereas the traditional store’s customer is over 40 and not going anywhere.

They tested the demand before committing, taking shop-in-shop space inside Shoppers Stop and Lifestyle first and watching people say they were glad Libas had finally reached their city. They now run around 51 stores across 14 to 15 cities, most opened in the past year.

He stopped looking at daily store numbers

Online traffic is controllable. Spend more and it moves. A store does ten lakh one day and zero the next, spikes on Mother’s Day and collapses in a heat wave, and none of that is actionable.

So he removed himself from the WhatsApp groups where daily store sales get posted. He watches footfall, visual merchandising and store efficiency instead, and judges the sales at monthly and annual cadence. It is a genuinely different reflex from running an e-commerce business.

The quick commerce claim

Sidhant will say this on record: within two to three years, in any category, if you are not on quick commerce you will fail. His reasoning is simple. When a customer wants something and it isn’t on the app, they don’t go elsewhere to find your brand. They buy a different brand.

Fashion is the one category where the shift hasn’t happened, because replicating 150 weekly launches across thousands of partner dark stores is impossible. So Libas is building its own dark stores for partners to pick from, and preparing its retail stores as fulfilment points, aiming at 30-minute delivery within a seven kilometre radius. Quick commerce is currently 2 to 3% of the business, targeted at 10 to 12%.

He does not think it replaces anything. It creates a new occasion: the puja tomorrow morning that you have nothing to wear for, where neither a store trip nor two-day shipping works.

Virtual try-on is a PR exercise

AI, he reckons, is running at maybe 60 or 70% of its potential. Fine for back-end processes where you can add a human layer. Not fine for anything a customer touches, where 95% accuracy is the floor.

He says roughly one in ten customers actually uses a try-on feature, and that he has seen state-of-the-art systems sitting unused in stores. Launching one is great PR. What he does admire is Zara building a catalogue around your avatar, because that removes the effort rather than adding it.

And a small thing he cares about: he has spent the past year correcting people who call Libas an ethnic wear brand. He would rather compete with fast fashion.

Listen to the full conversation with Sidhant Keshwani on FyndOutWithRagini.