How He Built a ₹100 Crore Brand Just By Selling Pants | Dhruv Toshniwal, The Pant Project

They launched a trouser brand a month before nobody needed trousers

Dhruv and Udit Toshniwal opened The Pant Project in 2020. The store was due in April. March happened instead, and the company spent its first four years entirely online.

The category was chosen precisely because it is unglamorous. Men were settling for trousers that almost fit, the product is technical, the experience is routinely irritating, and nobody found it exciting. That combination is exactly what makes it worth building in.

The internal joke is that customers should be able to outsource the problem: spend fifteen minutes finding trousers that work, buy enough for the year, and get on with their lives. That is a genuinely different product brief. The brand does not need men to become interested in fashion. It needs to remove a recurring annoyance reliably enough to be trusted.

"The customer should spend 15 minutes thinking about pants, and then get on with life."

Unlearning the family business

The brothers arrived with three generations of textile behind them, their grandfather having founded Banswara Syntex in 1976, which meant years of passive education about fabric, manufacturing, customers and cash at the dinner table.

The first thing they had to learn was that a consumer company cannot run at the tempo of the business that taught them. A manufacturer serves a brand relationship across decades. A D2C brand earns each person individually, responds to thousands of small signals, and lives in a memory that moves fast. They needed the family’s technical depth without inheriting its operating rhythm.

One brother creates demand, the other fulfils it

Udit trained at art school and leads product development, brand and marketing. Dhruv leads operations, finance, technology and the backend. Creating desire and delivering on it, split cleanly down the middle.

Their disagreements follow domain rather than seniority. Each gives the other room on the decisions he genuinely understands better, and only the larger disputes get tested against first principles, the team and the data. Clear ownership is what turns two different personalities into an advantage rather than a standing argument.

Fit as a retention system, not a returns problem

Trousers are hard to switch and easy to repeat. Once a man finds a rise, waist, length and silhouette that work, he can stay with the same brand for years. Most brands treat fit as the thing that causes returns. The Pant Project treated it as the thing that causes loyalty.

So the first collection, 30 styles, was custom-made, specifically to generate direct information about Indian body types. Customers measured themselves using instructional videos, free alterations absorbed the imperfect first attempts, and every completed order added another data point.

The signal was the second order, not the first thousand

They reached roughly a thousand orders in the first three months, during a pandemic, which was encouraging. The number that actually mattered came shortly after, when customers from that opening cohort came back within three or four months to buy again.

A first purchase can be produced by curiosity, a friend, a discount or good advertising. A second one suggests the product solved the problem. In a category built on fit, the repeat order was not revenue so much as evidence that the answer was trusted.

Six people, one marketer, and a very empty Kashmir

The early team was six people with a single marketing employee. On a trip to a Kashmir emptied out by the pandemic, the founders wore the product and shot content on the slopes. Dhruv went live on Instagram for an hour a week to explain the brand himself.

There was no separation between founder, model, presenter and distributor because there was no budget for one. The constraint produced speed and a recognisable voice, and it worked because the people who built the product were willing to narrate the problem in public.

The brand voice stays in-house

Scripts, shoots, editing, publishing and performance marketing were built internally from the start. Agencies can supply specific capabilities, but Dhruv’s position is that the central voice has to live inside the company.

There is a useful corollary he applies to himself. Some of what the younger marketers want to publish feels too unconventional to him personally, and he lets it go out anyway. Brand consistency does not require the founder to approve only the work he would have made.

Keeping the bootstrap habit after the money arrives

They ran without institutional capital for four years before raising, and Dhruv values that period for a specific reason: scarcity forces you to connect every rupee of spending to something a customer can feel.

More capital is not automatically better. After funding, small costs accumulate without scrutiny until somebody asks where it all went. The bootstrap habit is just the discipline of asking whether an expense strengthens the product, the relationship or the operating system.

The disconnected store is what is dying

Dhruv doesn’t think physical retail is in trouble. He thinks the disconnected store is. Someone who has bought online for years should not walk into a shop and be treated as a stranger; the company should already understand the relationship, with permission and care.

That means one customer view across both, and a store that evolves at digital speed. When the systems share context, the store stops being a warehouse with a till attached and becomes the part of the journey where confidence gets built.

Ten million pairs of trousers

He is reluctant to anchor the company’s motivation to an IPO date. What he and Udit describe wanting is to serve customers for decades and build something their grandchildren would still recognise, with a first audacious milestone of putting The Pant Project on ten million Indians.

The ambition is global and the operating focus is India, on the argument that Indian tailoring, fabric technology and consumer understanding can produce a specialist brand for the world. Longevity starts with relevance at home rather than the appearance of international scale.

Listen to the full conversation with Dhruv Toshniwal on FyndOutWithRagini.