Why Do Global Innerwear Brands Struggle in India | Yash Goyal, Krvvy

He cut apart a friend’s old bra to work out how it was built

Yash Goyal came out of venture debt to build Krvvy with Anant Bhardwaj, in a category neither of them could ever be the customer for. His first research method was a pair of scissors.

The problem with shapewear, as most Indian women have experienced it, is the tummy tucker: bought for a wedding, worn for three hours, endured for the fourth, and then abandoned in a wardrobe forever. The relief is in taking it off. That is a strange thing for a product category to be built on.

Yash’s question was whether the compromise was necessary at all. If shapewear could be comfortable enough to wear through an ordinary day, it stops being an occasion purchase and starts being underwear, which is a completely different business.

"An influencer can sell it once. The product has to speak for the second purchase."

Learning a garment by taking it apart

He is blunt that he is not the consumer and never will be. So he took an old bra belonging to a friend and cut it apart piece by piece to understand the construction, and discovered that it isn’t fashion at all. It is function: support, structure, comfort, and a tolerance of a millimetre or two before the whole thing stops working.

His mother named the company and packed orders for the first six months. The first testers were around a hundred women, friends and family and friends of friends, across ages, sizes and geographies, given samples with instructions to wear them, wash them, and report back.

Indian fit is not a smaller European fit

What came back was that even good brands were working off European and American sizing. Bodies are not a universal template, fat distribution differs, and the changes after pregnancy are real and specific. So the team studied anatomy, redesigned the patterns and dropped numeric sizing in favour of letters, because most people don’t know their measurements and won’t take them.

Fabric was the other half. An imported fabric that works in a cooler market becomes unbearable in Mumbai humidity, so they moved to a polyamide blend with attention to ventilation and evaporation, and to the gusset in particular, because a sensitive area with poor airflow becomes a problem rather than a product.

The high-compression product is deliberately not the hero

Customers do ask for more compression, and Krvvy makes those products. Yash just doesn’t market them much, because he knows they are bought once a year and put away.

The low-compression garment is the one he wants in the rotation, and the signal that the thesis is working is customers replacing their ordinary underwear with it and coming back for several pieces. He is explicit about the mechanics: comfort is a feeling, not a feature, and selling a feeling is much harder than selling a product. Which is precisely why he thinks it is worth doing.

Tier 2 is an access problem, not an awareness problem

Yash bristles at the assumption that smaller cities don’t understand the category. They are on the same Instagram, they see the same global brands, and in plenty of cases they have more disposable income than tier one. What they lack is access at a price that makes experimenting reasonable.

He also thinks the distraction level is lower, so a customer who tries the product is more likely to become a repeat buyer than a metro shopper with fifty alternatives. Around half of Krvvy’s orders come from tier two and tier three. Some of the content is made in Marathi, Telugu and Tamil, because people take pride in their own language and education travels further in it.

His favourite data point is a first celebrity order, entirely organic, from a woman in her seventies. He Googled the delivery address twice to check it was really her.

Each channel does a different job

The website is the owned store and the closest customer relationship. Amazon is the trust layer, because a first-time buyer nervous about a new innerwear brand is reassured by familiar returns and visible reviews. Quick commerce is utility, and he is unusually bullish on it: patience is dying across every generation, including his own parents, who now order on Blinkit despite having been against it.

The discipline is not listing everything everywhere. They study pin-code level demand, start narrow, and only double down where the data supports holding inventory, because the alternative is stranded stock.

Studying Jockey as a distribution problem

Yash talks about Jockey constantly, and not as a design rival. What Jockey built over thirty years is supply chain and distribution reach, and his first order from the Andaman Islands made the point: he asked what she usually buys, and the answer was Jockey, because that is what reaches her.

His argument is that the assortment can be more inclusive and the conversation more honest, but none of it matters without that reach. Which is also why he is resisting adjacent categories for now. The position has to be unmistakable before it can be extended.

Shark Tank bought trust before it bought sales

Krvvy raised ₹1.2 crore for 3% from Namita Thapar on Shark Tank India, valuing the company at ₹40 crore. Yash’s read on what it delivered is worth noting: the sales bump was modest, but the conversion funnel improved and the DMs arrived in volume.

What he valued most was saying the words out loud on national television without euphemism, in a category built on not discussing it, and getting no backlash for it. A new postpartum product came from the same instinct, after three separate new mothers described the same unmet need in feedback calls.

Listen to the full conversation with Yash Goyal on FyndOutWithRagini.