Unboxing $84B Sneaker Market | Sangeet Paryani & Nisha Lulla, Superkicks

FYNDOUTWITHRAGINI  |  PODCASTS  |  SNEAKERS, RETAIL AND CULTURE

It took seven meetings with Nike before Superkicks would open

Sangeet Paryani and Nisha built Superkicks from a Mumbai store into a national sneaker and lifestyle business. The founding decision that shaped everything was a decision to wait.

By 2017 Sangeet had agreements with a broad set of footwear brands and could have opened. Nike was the holdout, and he believed a sneaker store without one of the culture’s central names would be a weaker proposition than no store at all.

So he kept travelling to Bengaluru, meeting the team, refining the pitch. The seventh conversation produced a small opening order. That patience pushed the launch to 2018, and it settled what Superkicks was: an authorised multi-brand retailer, not a shop selling whatever stock it could get hold of.

"For the first two years, it was brand building. How do we bring more people into this community?"

The business started with one shoe he couldn’t get

At an Adidas trade show in 2016, Sangeet saw the NMD and asked whether it would reach the family’s stores in Jaipur. It would not. The most desirable product went to selected metro stores and specialist sneaker accounts.

His disappointment turned into a question about what it would take to build one of those accounts in India. The idea came from wanting the shoe. Everything after that was unromantic: researching the category, modelling the numbers, and building a deck that could persuade both his family and the brands.

He learned retail selling boxes in Rajasthan

Before any of the decks, Sangeet travelled the state selling footwear to local retailers for the family distribution business, and disliked a fair amount of it. Distribution felt prescriptive, and exclusive brand outlets left no room to reinterpret a product or invent an experience.

In hindsight it taught him the grammar of the industry: trust, inventory, location, retailer economics, and how long brand relationships take. Superkicks wasn’t a rejection of the family business. It was a creative layer built on everything that business had taught him.

He is honest about the door his father opened

Sangeet is direct about the advantage. Years of his father trading with integrity meant the family name got him in front of senior decision-makers, including a short meeting with Adidas leadership, where he pitched off a laptop in a car and came away with early support.

Access created the meeting. It did not create the business. They still had to define the customer, design the store, earn the allocation and prove sell-through. The point isn’t to disguise an advantage. It is to convert borrowed trust into credibility of your own.

Mumbai for practical reasons, not mythology

The first store was roughly 800 square feet in Khar. Mumbai brought attention and cultural energy, but the deciding factor was more boring: both founders knew the city, and in physical retail an exciting concept still comes down to the right neighbourhood, rent, team and daily execution.

They had built interest online before the doors opened, the first day was invite-only, and people kept queuing afterwards. The store doubled as the office, which meant feedback wasn’t a dashboard. It walked in.

Authorised retailer, not reseller

Superkicks buys through official agreements with the brands it carries and sells at or below MRP. A reseller works the aftermarket, sourcing sought-after pairs from individuals and pricing them by scarcity.

The two can sell the identical silhouette while running completely different risks, on authenticity, on pricing, and on what a customer is entitled to expect afterwards. Being clear about which one you are is a large part of what a sneaker customer is actually buying.

Eight days, then lockdown

The new Delhi store had been open eight days when the 2020 lockdown shut it. A launch event was planned, the team’s travel was booked, and rent carried on while sales stopped. It was a big commitment to have made.

The website, launched shortly before, became the way through. As supply resumed and sneaker interest accelerated, online drops brought volumes the infrastructure had never seen. The site crashed, duplicate orders got through, and the founders packed boxes themselves. What that period actually taught them was less about moving sales online than about how digital scarcity fails customers, and which guardrails to build next.

Giving creators the microphone

The team doesn’t define influence by follower count. They gravitate to musicians, athletes and creators doing work they rate, then try to let those people speak in their own voice. The Co-Sign platform gives independent musicians room to talk about their releases.

There is a cultural logic as well as a commercial one. Basketball, skateboarding and hip-hop grew sneaker culture internationally; India’s music scene brings its own language. Backing creators before they become obvious endorsements is how a retailer participates in a culture rather than renting it.

The collaboration that carried the biography

An early collaboration with Fila produced 90 numbered pairs of the Venom, called NH8 after the highway connecting Jaipur and Mumbai. Sangeet’s own movement between those two cities became the product story. They sold out in under twelve hours.

Scarcity helped, but scarcity on its own produces a limited shoe rather than a memorable one. It worked because the colourway, the name and the route belonged to the brand’s own history. A good partnership isn’t two logos side by side. It is the story neither partner could tell alone.

Two founders, two domains, one household

Sangeet describes himself as structured, research-led and checklist-driven. Nisha, a choreographer from the age of 18, works more intuitively and is strongest on people, networking, events, marketing and customer response. She trialled a month full-time at Superkicks and stayed.

What they learned is that collaboration does not require both founders to edit every decision. Clear domains protect speed and trust: either can ask for a view without that view becoming a veto. For a married founding team it does something else too, which is keep the disagreements inside the business rather than following them home.

Listen to the full conversation with Sangeet and Nisha on FyndOutWithRagini.