Startup Deep Dive : Berrylush — the bootstrapped women’s-wear brand a Shark Tank India name bought

In July 2026 a men’s fashion brand that had itself walked into Shark Tank India three years earlier — Snitch — paid an undisclosed sum to acquire a women’s-wear label it had never directly competed with: Berrylush, a Noida company that grew revenue from ₹61 crore in FY23 to ₹76 crore ($7.9 million) in FY24 while, by its own account, staying profitable from its first year. The label had never announced a marquee venture round, never appeared on the show that made its buyer famous, and was built on ₹30 lakh borrowed from a co-founder’s father.

That is the contradiction worth sitting with. In a D2C decade defined by cash-burning growth and celebrity pitches, Berrylush is the quiet counter-example: a bootstrapped, cash-generating western-wear brand that scaled on marketplace demand rather than headline funding, and then exited to a louder, larger, Shark-backed rival that wanted a ready-made women’s business rather than one built from scratch. This is how it happened, with the numbers on each side.

Quick facts

What they do

Berrylush is a direct-to-consumer women’s western-wear brand aimed at fashion-forward, value-conscious Indian women, mostly Gen Z and younger millennials. It designs and largely manufactures its own clothing, then sells through a mix of horizontal and fashion marketplaces plus its own website and app. The core catalogue spans dresses, tops, jumpsuits, co-ords, skirts and trousers, extended by two named sub-brands and an accessories range.

• Core categories: dresses, tops, jumpsuits, co-ords, skirts, trousers and workwear (Inc42, YourStory).
• Berrylush Curve: a plus-size line, with sizing reported from XS up to 7XL (Inc42).
• BIZwear: a dedicated professional/workwear line (Inc42).
• Accessories: handbags, belts and perfumes (Inc42).
• Positioning: “high-quality affordable western wear,” the gap the founders say they set out to fill (The Weekend Leader).

The origin

The founding insight was personal before it was commercial. Alok Paul and Anusha Chandrashekar both came from engineering-then-consulting backgrounds, and both landed at IIM Raipur for an MBA between 2013 and 2015, where they met. Paul had studied information technology at the Calcutta Institute of Engineering and Management, worked about three years at Infosys in Bengaluru, a short stint at Accenture, and then joined the lending-tech firm Artoo. Chandrashekar had a telecommunication-engineering degree from B.M.S College of Engineering in Bengaluru, worked at Tata Consultancy Services as a software engineer from 2010 to 2013, and after her MBA joined Deloitte. They married in early 2017 and, rather than settle into stable consulting salaries, decided to build a clothing brand together.

The gap they identified was specific: good-quality western wear for Indian women at prices the mass market could actually pay. India had premium imported labels and cheap unbranded apparel, but relatively little in the trustworthy, well-fitting, affordable middle. They started small and self-funded, with ₹30 lakh borrowed from Anusha’s father, a 300-square-foot unit, four machines and four tailors, working out of family office space in Noida to keep rent near zero. The name Berrylush was meant to signal something fresh, feminine and abundant. From that first cramped unit, the plan was never to be a reseller — it was to design and stitch in-house so the brand could control quality and move quickly on trends.

The struggle years

Berrylush did not have a single near-death drama so much as a long grind of manufacturing and distribution problems solved one at a time. The founders were engineers, not apparel veterans, and the early years were about learning a supply chain from the inside while competing against far better-capitalised marketplaces and brands.

• Bootstrapped start (around 2017–2018): no institutional capital, only ₹30 lakh of family money, four tailors and four machines in a 300 sq ft unit (The Weekend Leader).
• Learning manufacturing from scratch: the founders chose in-house production for quality and speed, which meant absorbing the cost and complexity of running a factory rather than outsourcing (Inc42, The Weekend Leader).
• Marketplace dependence: in its early scale phase the brand was heavily reliant on third-party portals — around 85% of sales came from marketplaces such as Amazon, Myntra and Nykaa, with only about 15% from its own website (The Weekend Leader, January 2022). That gave reach but left pricing power and customer data largely with the platforms.
• Founder departure (May 2025): co-founder Alok Paul left to join rival women’s-wear brand Littlebox as chief operating officer, leaving Chandrashekar to run the company through its final independent stretch (Inc42).

The through-line of the struggle was structural, not sensational: a small, profitable brand trying to grow production capacity and own more of the customer relationship while much larger, funded competitors set the terms on the marketplaces it depended on.

The turning point

The clearest turning point is the July 2026 acquisition by Snitch, because it put a number on years of quiet compounding and reset the brand’s trajectory. On one side of that event was a bootstrapped label doing about ₹76 crore in FY24 revenue with a small team; on the other was a Shark Tank India-featured menswear giant reporting roughly ₹900 crore in unaudited FY26 operating revenue that wanted an instant women’s-wear business.

• Before: Berrylush revenue of ₹61 crore (FY23) and ₹76 crore (FY24), profitable, roughly 38 employees as of August 2026 (Inc42; Tracxn).
• The event: Snitch acquired a 100% stake in Berrylush, announced in late July 2026; financial terms were not disclosed (Inc42; Indian Startup News).
• After: Snitch founder Siddharth Dungarwal set the stated ambition of building Berrylush into a “₹1,000 Cr women’s fashion brand,” describing the next phase as “Berrylush 2.0” with Chandrashekar and the existing team continuing (Inc42; Indian Startup News).
• The scale gap: Snitch reported FY26 operating revenue of about ₹900 crore, up roughly 81% from ₹498 crore the prior year, on the founder’s unaudited figures — a business more than ten times Berrylush’s size buying a foothold rather than building one (Indian Startup News).

A note on a common confusion: it was Snitch, the acquirer, that appeared on Shark Tank India (Season 2, an all-shark deal of ₹1.5 crore for 1.5% equity at a ₹100 crore valuation). Berrylush itself never pitched on the show; its link to Shark Tank India runs entirely through the company that bought it.

The money behind it

Berrylush’s capital story is unusual for a D2C brand of its visibility: it raised very little, disclosed even less, and grew mostly on its own cash flow. The external money that did come in was more strategic than large.

• Family seed: ₹30 lakh from co-founder Anusha Chandrashekar’s father, the brand’s original capital (The Weekend Leader).
• TMRW / Aditya Birla Fashion (November 2022): TMRW, the D2C venture of Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail, took a “significant minority” stake in Berrylush as one of eight digital-first brands (alongside Bewakoof, Nauti Nati and others) in which it deployed a combined ₹290 crore; the per-brand amount and stake were not disclosed (Free Press Journal; YourStory).
• Klub (around June 2023): revenue-based financing platform Klub extended ₹8 crore in debt-style capital to fund festive-season working capital, per ETRetail (Facebook/ETRetail).
• Disclosed totals: data platform Tracxn puts Berrylush’s total disclosed external funding at about $970K across two seed-stage rounds (November 2022 and June 2023) — a figure broadly consistent with the ₹8 crore Klub facility rather than a large equity raise.
• Exit: Snitch’s 2026 acquisition of 100% of the company; price undisclosed (Inc42; Indian Startup News).

The takeaway on the money is that no single backer “made” Berrylush in the venture sense. TMRW added a strategic parent and retail credibility; Klub added flexible working capital tied to sales; the rest came from customers.

How it makes money

Berrylush is a vertically integrated product business, not a marketplace or a pure dropshipper, so its economics look more like a fashion manufacturer with a strong online front end than like an asset-light aggregator.

• Money in: sale of own-brand women’s apparel and accessories, across marketplaces and its own D2C channels. Reported selling channels include Myntra, Amazon and Flipkart plus its own website and mobile app (Inc42).
• In-house manufacturing: the brand designs and largely stitches its own products, which lets it control quality and react quickly to trends — but means it carries factory and inventory costs rather than outsourcing them (Inc42; The Weekend Leader).
• Where the margin sits: by owning design and production and skipping wholesale middlemen, the gross margin is captured in-house; the cost of that is fixed manufacturing overhead and working capital tied up in inventory — the reason the Klub facility was raised for the festive season.
• The part people get wrong: because Berrylush sells heavily through marketplaces, it is easy to assume it is a reseller. It is the opposite — an own-label maker whose challenge is not sourcing product but owning the customer, which is why the founders publicly targeted lifting own-website sales toward half of the mix (The Weekend Leader).
• Profit posture: Inc42 reports the brand has been profitable since inception, a deliberate contrast to the growth-at-all-costs D2C playbook.

The numbers

Reported annual revenue, unit ₹ crore. FY23 and FY24 figures are as reported by Inc42; FY25 is a company projection cited by Inc42, not an audited result. Data platform Tracxn lists a lower “annual revenue” band for the registered entity as of 31 March 2025, which is noted below as a caveat.

• FY23 to FY24 growth: 24.5% year on year, from ₹61 crore to ₹76 crore (Inc42).
• FY24 revenue in dollars: ₹76 crore is about $7.9 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0.
• Profitability: “profitable since inception” per Inc42; the company has not published audited profit numbers, so treat the profit line as company-stated.
• Caveat / conflict: Tracxn lists the registered entity’s annual revenue in a ₹10–50 crore band as of 31 March 2025, below Inc42’s brand-level figures; the difference likely reflects entity-versus-brand reporting and timing, and neither is an audited public filing available here. Where they conflict, both are named.
• Headcount: about 38 employees as of 31 August 2026 (Tracxn) — a small team for the revenue, consistent with a lean, profitable operation.

Where the money comes from

Berrylush’s revenue mix is defined by two splits: channel (marketplace versus own site) and product (core western wear versus its extension lines). The surprise is how marketplace-led the brand remained even as it built its own D2C presence.

• Channel split (January 2022, The Weekend Leader): roughly 85% of sales from third-party portals (Amazon, Myntra, Nykaa) and about 15% from its own website — with a stated goal of pushing direct sales toward 50%.
• Channel breadth (2025, Inc42): Myntra, Amazon and Flipkart plus own website and app — a broad marketplace footprint typical of value western wear.
• Product extensions: the plus-size Berrylush Curve line (sizes reported to 7XL) and the BIZwear workwear line widen the addressable base beyond core dresses and tops (Inc42).
• Production scale: monthly output reported around 1.3 lakh units in 2024 (Inc42); one trade account describes growth from roughly 900 units to about 200,000 units a month over the brand’s life (Textile Insights) — the volume engine behind the revenue.
• The surprise: a brand widely visible on Myntra is not primarily a Myntra creature by design — its founders spent years trying to move the mix toward owned channels, because marketplace dependence is exactly the weakness a larger acquirer like Snitch can fix with its own retail and D2C muscle.

The risks

Even as an acquired, profitable brand, Berrylush carries concrete risks — most of them structural to value fast fashion in India.

• Marketplace concentration and margin pressure: with the bulk of historical sales on Amazon, Myntra, Flipkart and Nykaa, platforms control discovery, pricing dynamics and much of the customer data. Commission, advertising and discount demands on these portals can compress the margin of a value brand faster than it can raise prices.
• Integration and identity risk: Snitch has said it will run “Berrylush 2.0” while preserving the brand, but post-acquisition the original design DNA, team and customer trust can erode if the parent standardises too aggressively — and one of the two founders, Alok Paul, had already left in May 2025 before the deal.
• Fast-fashion economics: in-house manufacturing plus trend-led inventory means working capital is always at risk of being tied up in stock that stops selling; Berrylush already raised ₹8 crore of revenue-based financing to fund a single festive season, a sign of how inventory-heavy the model is.
• Competitive intensity: women’s western wear is crowded — Littlebox (where Paul went), Newme, Urbanic, Zara and marketplace private labels all fight for the same Gen Z buyer, keeping acquisition costs high and pricing keen.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from Berrylush is that profitability is optionality. Because the brand grew on customer cash rather than serial venture rounds, it never had to accept a bad valuation or a forced sale to survive; when a much larger, Shark-backed buyer decided it wanted a ready-made women’s business, Berrylush negotiated from a position of a healthy, profitable asset rather than a distressed one. In a market that spent years rewarding the loudest fundraisers, the quiet, cash-generating operator turned out to be the one worth buying. Build something that can pay its own way, and you get to choose your ending.

Frequently asked questions

Was Berrylush on Shark Tank India?

No. Berrylush itself never pitched on Shark Tank India. The Shark Tank India connection belongs to Snitch, the menswear brand that acquired Berrylush in 2026; Snitch appeared on Season 2 and secured an all-shark deal of ₹1.5 crore for 1.5% equity at a ₹100 crore valuation.

Who founded Berrylush and when?

Berrylush was founded by Alok Paul and Anusha Chandrashekar, who met during their MBA at IIM Raipur and married in 2017. Recent reporting (Inc42) dates the brand’s launch to 2018, while earlier profiles cite 2017 and data platform Tracxn lists 2015; the founders quit their consulting jobs to start it around 2017.

How much revenue does Berrylush make?

Inc42 reports revenue of ₹61 crore in FY23 and ₹76 crore in FY24 (up 24.5% year on year), with a company projection of ₹85 crore for FY25. Inc42 also reports the brand has been profitable since inception, though audited profit figures are not public.

How much funding did Berrylush raise?

Very little by D2C standards. It started on ₹30 lakh of family money, took a “significant minority” strategic stake from Aditya Birla Fashion’s TMRW venture in November 2022 (part of a ₹290 crore deal across eight brands, per-brand terms undisclosed), and raised ₹8 crore of revenue-based financing from Klub around June 2023. Tracxn puts total disclosed external funding at about $970K.

Who owns Berrylush now?

Snitch. In late July 2026 the Bengaluru menswear brand acquired a 100% stake in Berrylush for undisclosed terms, with co-founder Anusha Chandrashekar and the team continuing. Snitch’s founder set a stated goal of building Berrylush into a ₹1,000 crore women’s fashion brand.

Sources

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

• Inc42 — “Can Berrylush Become The Go-To Fast Fashion Brand For India’s Gen Z?” (2025)
• Inc42 — “Snitch Acquires D2C Women’s Fashion Brand Berrylush To Expand Beyond Menswear” (July 2026)
• Indian Startup News — “Shark Tank India-featured Snitch enters women’s fashion segment after acquiring Berrylush” (July 2026)
• The Weekend Leader — “Love at Work” founder profile of Alok Paul and Anusha Chandrashekar (January 2022)
• Free Press Journal — “Aditya Birla Fashion venture invests Rs 290 crore in 8 digital-first brands, includes Berrylush, Bewakoof” (November 2022)
• YourStory — “Aditya Birla Group’s TMRW acquires stake in Bewakoof, Nauti Nati, Berrylush” (November 2022)
• ETRetail (via Facebook) — Berrylush raises ₹8 crore from Klub revenue-based financing (2023)
• Tracxn — Berrylush and Berrylush Designs Private Limited company/legal-entity profiles (accessed September 2026)
• Textile Insights — “Berrylush Rides High On Fashion Innovation: From 900 Units To 2,00,000 Units Monthly”
• BW Disrupt — “Startup Snitch Snags Rs 15 M In ‘Shark Tank India S2’” (Snitch’s Shark Tank India deal)
• Trading Economics — USD/INR reference rate (September 2026)

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