How They’re Building India’s Next Big Menswear Brand | Tanvi and Harsh Somaiya, The Bear House

They launched with 35,000 pieces. Then the factory became the problem.

Tanvi and Harsh Somaiya built The Bear House out of an export manufacturing business. The thing that nearly held it back was the manufacturing business.

The first collection was 35 styles at roughly a thousand pieces each. That is a startling opening bet for a new label, and it was made less reckless by the fact that they already understood costing, fabric, construction and how marketplace demand behaved. They weren’t learning apparel and brand building simultaneously.

Volume also bought them speed. Thirty-five thousand pieces in market produce fast, unambiguous feedback on fits, colours, categories and price points. A launch can be a statement, but it works better as an instrument that tells the next collection what to be.

"Marketing gives you reach. Product gives you trust."

From making other people’s designs to making their own

Harsh was running an export operation when Tanvi joined him in Bengaluru. Trained in fashion and clothing technology, she took over sampling, and then changed the direction of the whole exchange: instead of waiting for clients to send designs, she started proposing them, built on what she had learned about each buyer’s philosophy, quality expectations and customer.

It was a low-risk rehearsal for starting a brand. Before The Bear House had a logo or a single consumer, they had already tested whether their own taste could earn a purchase order, and the answer came from professional buyers rather than from friends being kind.

The name started as a joke

Tanvi says Harsh looked like a bear. They liked it enough to put one across the garments, and the recurring device turned into something more useful than a graphic: a code customers could recognise without an explanation.

That is what a good brand device does. Simple enough to repeat, flexible enough to evolve, and it lets the clothes stay clean and minimal while still being identifiable at a glance.

The advantage that turned into a constraint

As Tanvi wanted more variety, the brand needed smaller and more responsive production runs. Harsh’s factory was built for scale and could not efficiently absorb every experiment a young label wants to try. The thing everyone assumed was their edge had become a limitation.

So she went outside it, learned to build supplier relationships, and made the brand independent in getting product made. Harsh later exited the manufacturing operation entirely, and The Bear House built the network it needed to outsource much larger volumes. Separating the two let each system do what it was actually designed for.

Profitability belongs in the design brief

They wanted a business that made money rather than one that deferred the question until the brand was famous. In practice that means knowing the product cost, the selling price, the channel margin and whether the unit can ever work, before increasing marketing spend.

In fashion those are not separate conversations. Fabric weight, construction, minimum order size, returns and discounting all decide the margin. No amount of storytelling makes an unviable garment viable.

Each channel does a different job

Marketplaces gave them discovery and an efficient route to early demand, which for a manufacturer-turned-brand was the fastest way to find out whether anyone wanted the product.

Direct commerce earns its place differently. It creates a less filtered relationship, where customers explain what fitted, what failed and what they want next. Marketplaces tell you what sold. Your own channel tells you why.

Using online density to decide where stores go

The company treats its online customer base as a heat map. Dense postal codes show where demand already exists, and cities with fewer established options often show more curiosity about a homegrown label than the saturated metros do.

That is expansion with evidence rather than instinct. A store doesn’t have to create every customer from scratch; it gives an audience that already exists a better way to buy. The founders point to Indore, Chennai, Chandigarh and Hyderabad as the reminder that appetite for fashion is not a metro phenomenon.

They ran the same sequence abroad

The UAE entry followed the Indian playbook exactly: marketplaces first, then their own digital channel, then stores once demand was visible.

Treating international expansion as a learning exercise before a real estate exercise meant they could watch payment behaviour, return rates and product response before committing to a physical experience. It also answered the question every Indian brand eventually asks, which is whether the design language travels.

Television compressed years of awareness

Shark Tank India made them recognisable well beyond their customer base, and gave them a national platform to explain the product, the profitability and the ambition behind it. They closed a deal with Namita Thapar structured as equity and debt.

Their own read is that the money was the smaller part. Familiarity transferred at a speed no marketing budget buys, strangers started stopping them while travelling, and later investor conversations began from a much clearer understanding of what already existed.

Building again after the version that failed

Tanvi refers to a difficult stretch in 2019 when something they had built did not work as intended. Neither of them presents what followed as a dramatic reinvention. They describe building again, with bigger ambitions and a clearer division of who does what.

Which is usually what endurance looks like inside a company. Not certainty, but a willingness to repeat the work with better judgement. Manufacturing knowledge gave them the base. Being able to revise the model is what let the brand outgrow it.

Listen to the full conversation with Tanvi and Harsh Somaiya on FyndOutWithRagini.