Site icon The Invincible India

Startup Deep Dive : FabAlley — a Rs 45 crore loss held flat, and an FY24 turnaround the filings do not yet confirm

The Invincible India

In FY23 the parent of FabAlley and Indya booked Rs 185 crore (about $19 million) in revenue from operations and a Rs 45 crore net loss — the exact same loss it had posted a year earlier on Rs 28 crore less in sales. A year after that, the company told investors it had turned EBITDA-positive and grown more than 30%. An independent database puts its FY24 revenue below the FY23 figure. Both claims sit in the public record.

High Street Essentials, the Delhi-NCR company behind India’s best-known homegrown women’s fashion labels, is a study in the gap between what a bootstrapped D2C brand reports to the press and what it files with the registrar. It built two brands from a 100-square-foot office, survived a lockdown that briefly took its revenue to zero, and reached the wedding-wear market a decade after it started selling crop tops online. This piece keeps the founder-stated numbers and the filed numbers side by side, names the source for each, and cuts anything that could not be verified this month.

Quick facts

Company High Street Essentials Private Limited (brands: FabAlley and Indya), Delhi-NCR (Gurugram per company; Noida per Tracxn)
Founded 2012
Founders Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik
Businesses FabAlley (women’s Western wear and loungewear); Indya (ethnic-fusion and occasion wear, including Weddings By Indya)
Latest FY revenue Rs 185 crore revenue from operations, FY23 (MCA filing via Entrackr). FY24 is contested: company-stated 30%+ growth, but Tracxn lists ~Rs 164 crore
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss Rs 45 crore, FY23 (MCA via Entrackr); company claims EBITDA profitability in FY24 (Inc42/Entrackr, May 2024)
Listed Private
Last reported valuation About Rs 700 crore (about $73 million), May 2024 round (Entrackr; Inc42’s coverage of the same round did not disclose a figure)
Total raised About Rs 180 crore before the May 2024 round (Entrackr); “over $18 million” (Inc42)

What FabAlley and Indya do

High Street Essentials is an omnichannel women’s fashion business that sells its own designs, both online and through physical stores, to Indian women shoppers. It runs two distinct brands, and their split matters to the whole story.

The origin: an M&A analyst and a Titan marketer

The two founders were childhood friends who came to fashion from outside it. Shivani Poddar, a finance graduate, worked in mergers and acquisitions at Avendus Capital in Mumbai; Tanvi Malik was a marketer at Titan. They debated a women’s fashion e-commerce idea for roughly six months before launching in 2012, according to Poddar’s account in Forbes India. The founding insight was a demographic one rather than a design one. Poddar observed that India was, in her words, the one large country where women’s fashion was smaller than men’s, and reasoned that rising female workforce participation and disposable income would close that gap — and that online retail, small in India at the time, would be the channel that captured it.

They started with little. Poddar has described a 100-square-foot office and roughly $100,000 of personal savings, followed by two years of bootstrapping before the first outside cheque of about $500,000 (Forbes India, 2024). FabAlley began as a fast-fashion Western-wear play for young Indian women, competing for the same shopper that Myntra and international brands were beginning to court. By FY17 the brand was doing around Rs 30-35 crore in revenue, the point at which the story stops being a pure e-commerce bet and becomes something harder.

The struggle years

Western wear alone was never going to be a large enough market in India, and the founders discovered it the hard way. Diwali, the peak of the Indian shopping calendar, exposed the problem: a brand built on dresses and jumpsuits had little to sell in the country’s biggest festive-buying window, when spending shifts to ethnic and occasion wear. Sales dipped when they should have surged. That seasonal hole in the catalogue, more than any single funding crunch, was the recurring near-death of the early years — a Western-wear brand structurally locked out of the moments when Indian women spend most on clothes.

Then came the harder shock. When COVID-19 lockdowns hit in 2020, an apparel business built on discretionary spending and physical trials saw demand collapse; Poddar has said revenue effectively went to zero during the worst of it (Forbes India, 2024). The registrar filings show how deep the dent ran: revenue that had reached Rs 127.66 crore in FY20 came with a swing to a net loss of Rs 4.23 crore and negative EBITDA of Rs 1.83 crore, against a small Rs 1.29 crore net profit and positive Rs 3.48 crore EBITDA in FY19 (Inc42, citing filings, 2020). The company kept its roughly 1,100 employees on the payroll without layoffs, repurposing fabric into masks and loungewear to keep cash moving, and raised emergency capital at a punishing discount — a round in mid-2020 that valued the company at about half its pre-COVID mark. Surviving 2020 intact, rather than any single product win, is what carried the business into its next phase.

The turning point: a Diwali gamble called Indya

The event that changed the trajectory was not a funding round; it was a product bet made to plug the festive hole. Facing another weak Diwali, the founders designed roughly 40 combinations of crop tops paired with skirts and Indian fabrics — Western silhouettes cut for an Indian occasion — and, by Poddar’s account, the collection sold out in about 15 days (Forbes India, 2024). That response convinced them to spin the idea into a standalone brand, Indya, rather than a sub-line of FabAlley.

The numbers on either side of that decision tell the story. FabAlley was a roughly Rs 30-35 crore Western-wear brand at the point Indya launched; within a few years Indya had grown to around 65% of the whole company’s business, per Poddar (Forbes India, 2024), and the group’s revenue from operations climbed from Rs 127.66 crore in FY20 to Rs 157 crore in FY22 and Rs 185 crore in FY23 (filings via Inc42 and Entrackr). Indya also gave the company a reason to move offline — ethnic and occasion wear is bought after touch and trial far more than Western basics are — which is what pushed High Street Essentials from a pure e-commerce label into shop-in-shops and, later, exclusive brand outlets. The pivot from Western wear to Indian occasion wear turned a seasonal weakness into the company’s largest brand.

The money behind it

High Street Essentials raised across roughly a decade in a mix of equity and debt, staying comparatively lean for a company running two brands and a physical-store network.

On totals and valuation, the sources diverge and are labelled as such. Entrackr reported the company had raised about Rs 180 crore before the May 2024 round and that the round valued it at about Rs 700 crore (about $73 million at Rs 96/$); Inc42, covering the same round, put total raising at “over $18 million” and did not disclose a valuation. The Rs 700 crore figure is therefore reported rather than independently confirmed, and is treated that way throughout this piece.

How it makes money

The business is a designer-and-retailer model — High Street Essentials owns the brands and the designs and captures the retail margin — with the revenue booked in two distinct ways in its filings.

The part observers get wrong is that occasion and wedding wear, not the Western-wear brand that carries the company’s name, is where the pricing power sits: Weddings By Indya’s Rs 5,000-25,000 tickets carry a very different margin from FabAlley’s fast-fashion basics.

The numbers

The cleanest audited series comes from registrar filings reported by Inc42 and Entrackr; FY24 and FY25 are only available as company statements or database estimates, and are flagged as such. Unit: Rs crore.

Fiscal year Revenue (Rs cr) Net profit/loss (Rs cr)
FY20 127.66 (filings via Inc42) -4.23 (filings via Inc42)
FY22 157 (filings via Entrackr) -45 (filings via Entrackr)
FY23 185 (MCA via Entrackr) -45 (MCA via Entrackr)
FY24 Company-stated 30%+ growth; ~164.2 per Tracxn (contested) Company claims EBITDA-positive; audited net figure not public
FY25 ~122 per Tracxn; company target was 50% growth Not disclosed

Two things stand out, and one of them is a genuine contradiction. First, losses were sticky at the top of the growth curve: the company held its net loss flat at Rs 45 crore across FY22 and FY23 even as revenue rose 17.8%, and its FY23 EBITDA margin, at about -14.2%, improved only modestly from about -17% the year before (Entrackr, 2024). Second, FY24 cannot be stated as fact: in May 2024 the company told the press it had turned EBITDA-positive and grown more than 30% (Inc42 and Entrackr), which would imply revenue well above the FY23 Rs 185 crore, yet Tracxn’s database lists FY24 revenue at about Rs 164 crore — below FY23. Those cannot both be right, and no audited FY24 profit-and-loss statement is public to settle it, so both are shown and neither is presented as confirmed.

Where the money comes from

The revenue mix has shifted well away from the brand the company is named after.

The surprise in the split: the fastest-growing reported revenue stream is agency commission, not the apparel sales the brand is built on — a sign of how much the business now runs through channels it does not fully own.

The risks

These are concrete, mechanism-level risks grounded in the company’s own filings and the category it operates in.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson from High Street Essentials is that a founder’s biggest opportunity can be hiding inside a recurring weakness. FabAlley’s structural flaw was that it had nothing to sell during Diwali, the very peak of Indian clothes-buying; rather than paper over that gap with discounts, the founders built an entire second brand to fill it, and Indya went on to become the larger half of the company. The discipline worth copying is narrower still: know which of your numbers are audited and which are your own press release. High Street Essentials has both a filed Rs 45 crore loss and a stated turn to EBITDA profitability in the public record, and the honest way to read the company is to hold the two apart until an audited FY24 statement reconciles them. For any operator raising on momentum, the reminder is that the registrar remembers what the press cycle forgets.

Frequently asked questions

Who owns FabAlley and Indya?

Both are brands of High Street Essentials Private Limited, a privately held company founded in 2012 by Shivani Poddar and Tanvi Malik. It remains venture- and debt-funded and is not listed on any exchange (Forbes India and company statements, 2024).

How much revenue does High Street Essentials make?

Its last clearly filed figure is Rs 185 crore in revenue from operations for FY23, up 17.8% from Rs 157 crore in FY22 (MCA filing via Entrackr, 2024). FY24 is contested: the company claimed 30%-plus growth, while Tracxn’s database lists about Rs 164 crore.

Is FabAlley profitable?

Not at the net level in its last filed year: High Street Essentials posted a Rs 45 crore net loss in FY23, the same as FY22 (MCA via Entrackr, 2024). The company said it turned EBITDA-positive in FY24, but no audited FY24 profit figure is public to confirm it.

How much funding has High Street Essentials raised?

Reports differ. Entrackr put total raising at about Rs 180 crore before its May 2024 round, when it added Rs 50 crore ($6 million) led by Sangita Jindal; Inc42 described the total as “over $18 million” (Inc42 and Entrackr, 2024). Earlier backers include India Quotient and SAIF Partners (now Elevation Capital).

What is Weddings By Indya?

It is High Street Essentials’ premium occasion and wedding-wear line under the Indya brand, launched in 2022 at roughly Rs 5,000-25,000 price points. It reached about 10-12% of the business within a year, and the May 2024 funding round was raised specifically to expand it (Forbes India and Inc42, 2024).

Sources

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

Found an error? Write to us and we’ll correct it in the open, dated, on the piece.

Exit mobile version