Startup Deep Dive : iTokri — how a documentary maker turned a rice mill into a Rs 27 crore handmade-goods business

In FY2021-22, an online craft store run out of a corner of a rice mill in old Gwalior turned over close to ₹27 crore (about $2.8 million) — and it did so without taking a single rupee of institutional funding. The person who built it, Nitin Pamnani, had never worked in retail; he was a documentary filmmaker who had made roughly 20 films for NGOs and companies, one of which won an award at the Mumbai International Film Festival.

iTokri is the business he and his wife Jia Pamnani started in 2012, and it does something most Indian internet companies decided long ago was too slow: it buys handmade goods outright from artisans, holds the stock in its own warehouse, and sells it online. No marketplace, no third-party sellers, no venture money. This is the story of how that model got to nearly ₹27 crore, why revenue has since drifted down to ₹24.3 crore, and what a bootstrapped craft e-tailer can teach founders who are told the only way to scale is to raise.

Quick facts

What iTokri does

iTokri (Hindi for “a basket”) is an online store that sells Indian handmade and handloom products directly to shoppers in India and abroad. What sets it apart from a marketplace is the model underneath.

• What it sells: handcrafted fabrics and garments (phulkari, bandhani, ikat), sarees and dupattas, jewellery, paintings (including pattachitra), stationery, home décor and wooden goods (30stades; The Better India).
• Who it sells to: individual consumers, roughly 80% in India and 20% overseas, with the US, UK, Canada, Middle East and Europe cited as the main international markets (Weekend Leader; 30stades).
• How it is structured: inventory-led first-party (1P) retail — iTokri buys stock outright from artisans, warehouses it in Gwalior and ships it, rather than letting third-party sellers list (30stades; ECDB notes 100% 1P sales).
• Scale of catalogue: over 100,000 product listings, with as many as 500 new SKUs added per day before its platform upgrade (Shopify case study; Weekend Leader cites about 80,000 items).

The origin: a rice mill and a bet on craft

Nitin Pamnani spent over a decade in Delhi after college, working as a documentary filmmaker and producing around 20 films for NGOs and corporations, per The Weekend Leader. Around 2010-2011 he and Jia moved back to his hometown, Gwalior — partly to be with his parents, partly out of concern about Delhi’s pollution. Jia is reported to have trained as a microbiologist.

They launched iTokri in 2012 from part of a rice mill owned by Nitin’s father in Haider Ganj, in the old city. The founding insight was simple and, at the time, unfashionable: India’s artisans made things people around the world wanted, but the people who sold those things captured most of the value while the makers captured little. If a company bought directly from artisans, paid them upfront and fairly, and put their names and photographs next to the products, it could build trust with buyers and lift incomes for makers at the same time. Nitin has said the venture began with about ₹20 lakh he borrowed from friends, with some money added by his father (The Weekend Leader; The Better India). One earlier account puts the initial outlay closer to ₹50 lakh (30stades); either way, it was seed capital from family and friends, not investors.

The struggle years

Building an e-commerce operation in Gwalior in 2012 meant building almost everything from scratch. There was no local e-commerce infrastructure, no ready pool of trained staff, and no easy way to find artisans scattered across remote clusters. The team had to learn product photography, packaging and shipping logistics on its own, and it had to teach many of its suppliers the basics of invoicing and, later, GST compliance (The Weekend Leader).

Cash was the other early obstacle. Cash-on-delivery, then the default trust mechanism for Indian online shoppers, was not available to a small unknown store, so iTokri improvised a cash-after-delivery arrangement to reassure buyers who had never heard of it (The Weekend Leader). The bigger structural strain was the model itself: because iTokri buys inventory upfront rather than listing other people’s stock, every rupee of growth had to be funded out of working capital and retained profit, not someone else’s balance sheet.

The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 were the sharpest test. Physical retail and craft fairs shut, and thousands of artisan households lost their usual buyers. iTokri reported that it kept paying its artisan partners through the period rather than cancelling orders (30stades), a choice that protected its supply base but put pressure on its own cash at exactly the moment demand was uncertain.

The turning point

The clearest inflection in iTokri’s published record is its move to Shopify Plus, the enterprise tier of the platform it had used since its early days as a small domestic store. According to Shopify’s own case study, the upgrade and the automation it enabled were followed by measurable gains: international revenue grew 91% year over year, returning customers rose 42%, and the team spent 50% less time on admin and sales setup. For a company that was, by then, adding hundreds of SKUs a day across more than 100,000 listings with a team of around 90 people, the operational leverage mattered more than any single marketing campaign.

The turning point is best read alongside the revenue arc on either side of it. iTokri had grown from a ₹20 lakh idea in 2012 to close to ₹27 crore in turnover by FY2021-22 (The Better India; The Weekend Leader). The international engine that Shopify Plus unlocked helped defend that base even as overall revenue later settled to ₹24.3 crore in FY25 (Tracxn) — a reminder that for a bootstrapped inventory business, the turning point is often about doing the same volume with far less friction, not about a step-change in scale.

The money behind it

iTokri’s funding story is short, and that is the point.

• Institutional funding: none on record. The founders describe the business as bootstrapped, funded by initial family-and-friends capital and reinvested profit (30stades; The Better India).
• Seed capital: about ₹20 lakh at launch in 2012, borrowed from friends with some money from Nitin’s father (The Weekend Leader; The Better India); one account cites up to ₹50 lakh (30stades).
• Crunchbase listing: shows a negligible total of roughly $13.7K across a single round from six investors — a figure so small it is consistent with the company’s bootstrapped description rather than a genuine venture round (Crunchbase).
• Valuation: no priced round, so no third-party valuation is on record.
• Ownership: the entity’s board lists four Pamnani-family directors — Nitin Kumar Pamnani, Sakshi Kumari Pamnani, Kavita Pamnani and Ashok Pamnani (Tofler) — consistent with a closely held, family-run company.

How it makes money

iTokri earns the way a specialist retailer does, not the way a marketplace does. The mechanics:

• Money in: retail sales of handmade goods to end consumers, at a marked-up price over what iTokri pays the artisan. Because it holds title to the stock, the gross margin is the spread between purchase cost and sale price, not a listing commission or take rate.
• Costs out: the upfront cost of buying inventory from artisans, plus warehousing, photography and cataloguing, packing, shipping (domestic and cross-border), payment-gateway fees and a Gwalior-based team reported at between 90 and 150 people (Shopify; The Weekend Leader).
• Where the margin sits: in sourcing directly and cutting out middlemen. Artisans quoted in coverage say iTokri keeps among the thinnest retail margins they deal with, and that direct sourcing has lifted their own earnings by two to three times over the years (30stades; The Weekend Leader).
• The part people get wrong: iTokri is frequently described as a marketplace or aggregator. It is not — it is a 1P inventory business (ECDB notes 100% first-party sales in 2025), which is why working capital, not seller acquisition, is its binding constraint.

The numbers

iTokri does not publish detailed audited figures, and the granular MCA-derived numbers sit behind data-provider paywalls. What is on the public record are two revenue anchors and a set of year-on-year directional changes; exact rupee figures for the intervening years are not disclosed and are shown as such below rather than estimated.

Read together, the picture is of a business that peaked near ₹27 crore in FY22, dipped in FY23, recovered profitability in FY24, and ended FY25 roughly flat on revenue at ₹24.3 crore but with a sharp squeeze in net profit. In short: revenue has plateaued below its 2022 high, and margins have tightened.

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix concentrates in two places — one product category and one geography.

• By category: textiles dominate. Coverage puts fabrics and garments at roughly 70-80% of sales, with jewellery, art, stationery and home décor making up the rest (The Better India; 30stades). ECDB classifies more than half of iTokri.com sales under a single “Hobby & Leisure” category in 2025.
• By geography: India is the core, at about 80% of sales, with roughly 20% coming from overseas buyers in the US, UK, Canada, the Middle East and Europe (The Weekend Leader). ECDB’s estimate puts India at 81% of iTokri.com revenue in 2025 — close to the founders’ own split.
• By buyer behaviour: repeat purchasing is a meaningful contributor. An older account cited over 300,000 customers with around 100,000 repeat buyers (30stades, 2020), and the Shopify Plus migration was followed by a 42% rise in returning customers.
• The surprise: the international slice is small in share but was the fastest-growing part of the business, up 91% year over year after the Shopify Plus upgrade (Shopify) — the opposite of the assumption that a Gwalior craft store is a purely domestic story.

The risks

Three concrete risks stand out from the public record, each with a clear mechanism.

• A revenue plateau that funding cannot easily break. Turnover went from close to ₹27 crore in FY22 to ₹24.3 crore in FY25 (The Better India; Tracxn), essentially flat-to-down over three years. Because iTokri is bootstrapped and inventory-led, growth is capped by internally generated cash: it cannot buy far more stock than its profits allow, so it lacks the venture cushion that lets marketplace rivals subsidise growth.
• Category and inventory concentration. With textiles at an estimated 70-80% of sales and more than 100,000 SKUs held as owned stock, a shift in handloom or ethnic-wear demand hits the bulk of revenue while leaving iTokri holding slow-moving inventory it has already paid artisans for — a double squeeze on cash and margin. The 36.9% fall in FY25 net profit (Tofler) shows how quickly the margin line can move.
• Platform and cross-border dependence. The store runs on Shopify Plus and third-party payment and logistics rails, and its fastest-growing segment is international. That exposes about a fifth of revenue to currency swings, cross-border shipping costs and customs friction, and ties the business to platform pricing and policy it does not control.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from iTokri is not “stay small”. It is that the shape of your business model decides which constraint you are fighting. By choosing to own inventory and buy directly from artisans, the Pamnanis built genuine trust with both makers and buyers and reached nearly ₹27 crore without outside capital — but they also chose working capital, not seller supply, as the wall they would eventually hit. A venture-backed marketplace would have swapped that wall for a different one: the need to keep raising to fund losses. Neither is free. iTokri’s record suggests that a founder who understands, from day one, exactly which constraint their model imposes can build something durable and profitable in a category most investors ignore — provided they are honest that the same choice which protects the mission also caps the pace.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded iTokri and when?

iTokri was launched in 2012 by Nitin Pamnani, a former documentary filmmaker, and his wife Jia Pamnani, reported to have trained as a microbiologist. The company, ITOKRI ENTERPRISES PRIVATE LIMITED, was incorporated on 4 November 2011 and is based in Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh (Instafinancials; The Weekend Leader).

How much revenue does iTokri make?

iTokri reported close to ₹27 crore in turnover in FY2021-22 (The Better India; The Weekend Leader), and Tracxn lists annual revenue of ₹24.3 crore as on 31 March 2025. Exact profit figures are not publicly disclosed, though the business is described as profitable.

Has iTokri raised venture funding?

No institutional funding is on record. The founders describe iTokri as bootstrapped, started with roughly ₹20 lakh of family-and-friends capital and grown on reinvested profit (30stades; The Weekend Leader). Crunchbase lists only a negligible ~$13.7K.

Is iTokri a marketplace?

No. iTokri is an inventory-led first-party retailer: it buys goods outright from artisans, warehouses the stock in Gwalior and sells it directly, rather than hosting third-party sellers (30stades; ECDB).

How many artisans does iTokri work with?

iTokri says it works with around 10,000 artisans, reported as spread across roughly 500 clusters, and its Shopify case study cites nearly 10,000 suppliers (The Weekend Leader; The Better India; Shopify).

Sources

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

• The Better India — profile of iTokri and the Pamnanis, artisan network and FY22 turnover (April 2022)
• The Weekend Leader — “Heart for Art”, founder backgrounds, origin, artisans and staff, FY2021-22 revenue (2022)
• 30stades — iTokri business model, geography, COVID-19 response and customer base (June 2020)
• Tracxn — iTokri company profile and annual revenue as on 31 March 2025 (2026)
• Tofler — ITOKRI ENTERPRISES PRIVATE LIMITED directors, capital and year-on-year financial changes (2026)
• Instafinancials — CIN, incorporation date and filing status (2026)
• ZaubaCorp — company registration details (2026)
• Shopify — iTokri case study: international revenue growth, returning customers, catalogue and team size (2024)
• ECDB — iTokri.com channel estimates: 1P sales share and India revenue share, 2025 (2026)
• Crunchbase — iTokri funding listing (2026)

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