Startup Deep Dive : Bombay Shirt Company — a made-to-measure brand that keeps losing money while growing 36% a year

Bombay Shirt Company has spent thirteen years trying to convince Indian men that a shirt should be built around a body, not the other way round. In the financial year through March 2025 the Mumbai company selling that idea reported ₹71.8 crore ($7.5 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0, 18 September 2026) in revenue, up 36.5% on the year before, and still closed the books with a ₹23.3 crore net loss, as per financial data compiled by Inc42.

That contradiction — a made-to-measure apparel brand growing fast while bleeding cash on almost every stitched collar — is the story of the company’s entire run: an online tailoring experiment that had to become a mall retailer, then a factory operator, and now, in its most recent pivot, something closer to a lifestyle club with a coffee counter attached.

Quick facts

What they do

Bombay Shirt Company sells made-to-measure menswear — shirts first, later trousers, chinos, denim, knitwear, jackets and outerwear — built to a customer’s own measurements rather than picked off a size chart. It reaches customers through its own e-commerce site and app, and through more than twenty owned and franchised stores across ten-plus Indian cities where in-house stylists take measurements and place custom orders, according to Indian Retailer’s reporting on the brand’s 2024 funding round. Around 30% of revenue still comes from online orders, with the rest through physical retail, per a case study published by investor Lightbox. The company has since added womenswear through its Pause label and other lines under the same parent, moving from a single-category online shirt-maker into a multi-brand, omnichannel apparel house.

The origin

Akshay Narvekar started Bombay Shirt Company in 2012 after moving back to India and running into a problem that off-the-rack retail could not solve: his frame, and specifically his longer arm length, meant that no ready-made shirt fit him properly, so he had every shirt tailored instead, as he told Indian Retailer in an interview on the brand’s evolution. That everyday frustration became the founding insight — that fit, not fabric or logo, was the thing Indian menswear retail was failing to sell — and it shaped a business built around individual measurement rather than standard sizing. The company opened its first physical store in Kalaghoda, south Mumbai, in its second year of operation, an early signal that a “custom, online-only” brand would need a physical counter before long, per the same Indian Retailer account.

The struggle years

The company’s growth has come in fits and starts, each one forcing a change in how it operated rather than what it sold. By December 2019, seven years after launch and with roughly sixteen stores spread across India, Dubai and New York, Bombay Shirt Company took its first institutional cheque of scale — $8 million (about ₹56.6 crore) from Lightbox Ventures — specifically because the pure online model had hit a ceiling; the money was earmarked to automate production and supply chain and to fund a jump to 40–50 physical locations within eighteen months, as Inc42 reported at the time. That plan collided almost immediately with the pandemic, and by late 2020 the company had responded by breaking out of its founding category altogether, launching bottomwear — jeans, chinos, dress pants and stretch pants — after eleven years as a shirts-only business, according to Indian Retailer.

The next stress point was financial rather than strategic. Custom retail is expensive to run — every order needs a fitting, a pattern and a factory slot — and by the company’s own account to Lightbox, calendar year 2023 was spent correcting for it: gross margins rose 12% and cash burn fell 33% over that year, an implicit admission that the burn rate before the correction had been unsustainable for a company still years from profit. None of these were near-death moments in the dramatic sense of a public shutdown notice, but together they describe a business that had to re-engineer its model twice — once for channel (online to omnichannel) and once for cost discipline — before it could raise growth capital on better terms.

The turning point

The clearest inflection point is the funding round that closed in stages between 8 February and 12 February 2024: an initial $3.2 million (₹26.9 crore) bridge that was upsized to a ₹54 crore Series B led by Singularity Ventures’ Growth Opportunities Fund I, with CaratLane co-founder Mithun Sacheti and existing backers Amit Patni, Arihant Patni and Lightbox participating, per Inc42 and Indian Retailer. Unusually, part of the round was structured as a secondary sale — new investors buying out shares held by former employees — and it coincided with COO Chippy Mehta being elevated to co-founder.

Before that round, the company was operating around 18–20 stores across ten cities and had just closed a fiscal year (FY24) with ₹52.6 crore in revenue against a ₹27.2 crore net loss, per Inc42’s financial tracker. After it, the store count climbed to 25 by the end of 2024 and the company set a target of roughly 40 stores through 2025 — more than double where it started that expansion cycle — while revenue for FY25 rose to ₹71.8 crore, a 36.5% jump, even as the net loss narrowed only modestly to ₹23.3 crore, according to the same Lightbox case study and Inc42 data. The 2024 round did not fix profitability; it financed the retail footprint that the company is now betting will fix it.

The money behind it

• April 2014, angel round: approximately $2 million led by Kae Capital, with participation from All In Capital and angel investors — the company’s first recorded institutional funding (Tracxn).
• June 2016: $1 million (₹6.6 crore) raised to fund technology infrastructure, staffing and offline expansion, as founder Akshay Narvekar told Indian Retailer.
• December 2019, growth round: $8 million (₹56.6 crore) from Lightbox Ventures — the company’s first large institutional cheque, aimed at automating production and expanding to 40–50 stores (Inc42).
• February 2024, Series B: ₹54 crore (about $6.5–6.8 million), led by Singularity Ventures with CaratLane co-founder Mithun Sacheti, Amit Patni, Arihant Patni and Lightbox participating; structured partly as a secondary sale of employee shares (Inc42, Indian Retailer, FashionNetwork India, Apparel Resources).
• January 2025: a further ₹11 crore round with Singularity AMC as lead investor, per Tracxn’s funding record.
• Total raised to date: trackers disagree on the cumulative figure — Inc42 puts total funding at $16.2 million across four disclosed rounds, CB Insights at $18.7 million across six rounds, and Tracxn at $24.8 million across eleven rounds counting smaller angel checks; none of the three discloses a current valuation.
• What each backer changed: Kae Capital and the Patni family (Amit Patni sits on the board, per Tofler’s director records) backed the original online model; Lightbox’s 2019 cheque funded the shift into physical retail and automation; Singularity Ventures’ 2024 round funded the current store rollout and brought in Mithun Sacheti’s retail-scaling experience from CaratLane.

How it makes money

The model is direct-to-consumer manufacturing rather than a marked-up retail markup: the company sources fabric centrally from a curated network of roughly eight to ten mills across Europe, India, Turkey and Japan, and cuts and stitches each order to individual measurement rather than holding finished-goods inventory, Narvekar told Indian Retailer. As stores have multiplied, production has been distributed rather than centralised — the company adds a new factory for roughly every three stores it opens, according to the same interview, rather than running all output through one plant.

• Money in: direct sales through the company’s app and website (about 30% of revenue) and through owned and franchised stores (about 70%), per Lightbox’s investor case study.
• Where the margin sits: the company says its stores generate roughly twice the industry-average revenue per square foot and reach breakeven in three to six months — about half the typical timeline for Indian apparel retail — figures Lightbox attributes to the made-to-order model’s higher average ticket and lower unsold-inventory markdowns.
• The part people get wrong: a made-to-measure shirt brand looks like a premium, high-margin niche business from the outside; in practice, every order still requires a human fitting, a cut pattern and a factory slot, which keeps gross margins tighter and operating costs higher than a standard ready-to-wear retailer carrying pre-made stock — a structural reason the company posted a net loss even as revenue grew 36.5% in FY25 (Inc42).
• Cost discipline: the company told Lightbox it cut cash burn by 33% and lifted gross margins 12% over calendar 2023, the clearest public signal of where costs were previously running too high.

The numbers

Only two fiscal years of financials are in the public record via Inc42’s MCA-sourced tracker as of this research in September 2026; earlier-year filings were not found in the sources checked for this piece, so they are omitted rather than estimated.

• FY24 revenue: ₹52.6 crore, with a net loss of ₹27.2 crore — a loss equal to over half of revenue that year (Inc42).
• FY25 revenue: ₹71.8 crore, up 36.5% year-on-year, against a ₹23.3 crore net loss and a -32.5% net margin — losses narrowing in relative terms even as the absolute revenue base grew (Inc42).
• FY25 total expenses of ₹95.2 crore against ₹71.8 crore revenue show the company still spends roughly ₹1.33 for every ₹1 it earns (Inc42).

Where the money comes from

• Channel split: about 30% of revenue online through the app and website, and about 70% through physical stores, per Lightbox’s investor case study on the company’s retail data practice.
• Customer concentration — the surprise: the top 10% of customers account for roughly 40% of revenue, according to the same Lightbox analysis, meaning repeat, high-spend customers matter disproportionately more to Bombay Shirt Company than to a typical volume-driven apparel retailer.
• Store-format split: high-street stores convert at 90–95%, against 50–55% for mall locations, per Lightbox’s data — a gap the company has used to steer its site-selection strategy toward high-street and away from mall-anchored expansion.
• Category split: the business began as shirts-only for its first eleven years, then added bottomwear in late 2020 and later jackets and knitwear, with womenswear carried separately under the Pause label (Indian Retailer).
• Geographic footprint: stores are concentrated in metro and large tier-1 markets — Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bengaluru and others — with new openings through 2025 and 2026 in cities including Jaipur, Kolkata and Chennai, and eight stores across the Delhi NCR region alone as of a store opening reported in March 2026 (Indian Retailer, Lightbox).

The risks

• Persistent unprofitability funding a capital-heavy rollout: the company posted a ₹23.3 crore net loss in FY25 on ₹71.8 crore of revenue even after a claimed cost correction in 2023, and it is simultaneously trying to more than double its store count from 18 to around 40 over 2024–25 (Inc42, Lightbox) — a combination that keeps it dependent on further external funding rounds like the ₹11 crore raise Tracxn recorded in January 2025.
• Production capacity tied to store rollout speed: the company’s factory-per-three-stores manufacturing model means new capacity must be stood up in step with every store opening; a made-to-order brand that cannot turn a custom fitting into a finished garment on schedule risks the exact customer trust its model is built on (Indian Retailer).
• Experiential-retail overheads from “The Den”: the company has begun converting stores into “The Den” — combined menswear, grooming and café outlets, launched in cities including Chennai — as a response to declining mall footfall and rising e-commerce competition, per D2C Insider Pulse and Indian Retailer’s FranchiseTV coverage; folding hospitality services into an apparel retail footprint raises fixed costs and brings in service-quality variables the company does not fully control.

The takeaway

Bombay Shirt Company’s history is less a straight growth curve than a series of forced re-inventions — from web-only to store-based, from one category to five, from centralised to distributed manufacturing — each triggered not by ambition but by a ceiling the previous model had hit. The lesson that generalises beyond menswear retail is that a genuinely custom, high-touch product does not scale the way a standard one does: every unit of growth adds a proportional unit of operating complexity, whether that is a fitting room, a factory slot or, now, a barista. Fixing the gap between fast revenue growth and a still-wide loss is less about finding new customers than about making that per-unit complexity cheaper — which is precisely the work the company describes itself doing in cutting cash burn and lifting gross margins through 2023, long before its topline started moving faster.

Frequently asked questions

What does Bombay Shirt Company sell?

Made-to-measure and ready-to-wear menswear — shirts, trousers, chinos, denim, knitwear and jackets — built to individual customer measurements, sold online and through more than twenty stores across India, alongside a separate womenswear line called Pause (Indian Retailer).

Who founded Bombay Shirt Company and when?

Akshay Narvekar founded the brand in 2012 after struggling to find ready-made shirts that fit his frame; Chippy Mehta and Shyam Sukhramani were later elevated to co-founders. The parent legal entity, Tomorrowland Apparels Private Limited, was incorporated on 12 February 2014 (Indian Retailer; Tofler).

How much funding has Bombay Shirt Company raised?

Named rounds include a roughly $2 million angel round in April 2014 led by Kae Capital, $1 million in June 2016, $8 million from Lightbox Ventures in December 2019, and a ₹54 crore Series B in February 2024 led by Singularity Ventures. Trackers put cumulative funding anywhere between $16.2 million (Inc42) and $24.8 million (Tracxn), depending on which smaller rounds are counted.

Is Bombay Shirt Company profitable?

No. It reported a net loss of ₹27.2 crore in FY24 and ₹23.3 crore in FY25, even as revenue grew 36.5% to ₹71.8 crore in FY25, according to Inc42’s financial data. The company has said it cut cash burn by 33% and raised gross margins by 12% through calendar 2023, per Lightbox Ventures.

How many stores does Bombay Shirt Company operate?

Store counts have grown from about 18 in 2022 to 25 by the end of 2024, with a target of roughly 40 through 2025, per a Lightbox Ventures case study; the company continued opening stores into 2026, including in Delhi NCR and Chennai, where it launched its combined retail-grooming-café “Den” format (Indian Retailer).

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Inc42, “Bombay Shirt Company — Funding & Revenue,” September 2026
• Inc42, “Bombay Shirt Company Financials — Revenue, P&L & Cash Flow,” September 2026
• Inc42, “Exclusive: Bombay Shirt Company Bags $3.2 Mn From Singularity Ventures, CaratLane’s Mithun,” February 2024
• Inc42, “Bombay Shirt Company To Go After Pants With Funding From Lightbox,” December 2019
• Indian Retailer, “Funding Alert: Bombay Shirt Company Raises Rs 54 Cr in Series B Funding Led by Singularity Ventures,” February 2024
• Indian Retailer, “Draping Tomorrow: Bombay Shirt Company’s Evolution in Threads” (interview), 2026
• Indian Retailer, “Our fabrics are sourced centrally from our manufacturing unit in Mumbai: Akshay Narvekar” (interview)
• Indian Retailer, “Bombay Shirt Company Opens New Store at DLF Midtown Plaza in West Delhi,” March 2026
• Indian Retailer / FranchiseTV, “Bombay Shirt Company Unveils ‘The Den’ in Chennai,” June 2026
• FashionNetwork India, “Bombay Shirt Company raises Rs 54 crore in funding round led by Singularity Ventures,” February 2024
• Apparel Resources, “Bombay Shirt Company raises Rs. 54 crore,” February 2024
• Tracxn, “Bombay Shirt Company — Company Profile, Funding & Investors,” September 2026
• CB Insights, “Bombay Shirt Company — Financials,” September 2026
• Tofler, “Tomorrowland Apparels Private Limited — Company Profile” (CIN U18109MH2014PTC253178), September 2026
• Lightbox Ventures, “Bombay Shirt Company X Lightbox: Scaling Retail with Data Analytics”
• Lightbox Ventures, “Lightbox-backed Bombay Shirt Co Refuels for the Next Level,” February 2024
• D2C Insider Pulse, “Bombay Shirt Company Reinvents Retail with The Den, Blending Custom Fashion, Grooming and Café Experiences,” 2026

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