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Startup Deep Dive : Libas — how a two-day sellout built India’s first Rs 1,000 crore D2C ethnic wear label

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The Invincible India Startup Deep Dive featured graphic for Libas.

Libas spent nearly a decade building itself without a single rupee of institutional money, then turned an unsold pile of failed-startup inventory into India’s first direct-to-consumer ethnic wear label to cross ₹1,000 crore (~$104 million, at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) in annualised revenue. But the same expansion that got it there also broke a ten-year streak of profits: FY25 revenue rose 25.2% to ₹609.1 crore, and net profit flipped from a ₹4.8 crore gain to a ₹16.5 crore loss in the very same year.

That contradiction — record scale, first-ever loss — sits at the centre of the Libas story. It is a business built by a manufacturing family’s son who tried and failed at e-commerce once, stumbled into a kurta boom by accident, and is now racing to open stores and quick-commerce nodes fast enough to justify a market position it has never fully monetised.

Quick facts

Company Libas (parent: Zivore Apparel Pvt Ltd)
Founded Family apparel manufacturing business started 1985 by Sunil Keshwani; Libas brand built out from 2013-2014
Founder(s) Sunil Keshwani (manufacturing base); Sidhant Keshwani, CEO since 2013, built and runs the Libas brand
Businesses Women’s ethnic and fusion wear (kurtas, suits, sarees) online and offline, plus sub-brands Libas Extra Love, Libas Art, Libas Kids and Gerua
Latest FY revenue ₹609.1 crore, FY25 (up 25.2% from ₹486.5 crore in FY24)
Latest FY profit/loss Net loss of ₹16.5 crore, FY25 (versus a ₹4.8 crore profit in FY24)
Listed (date + exchange) or Private Private; not listed. (Note: “Libas Consumer Products Ltd”, ticker LIBAS on the NSE, is an unrelated Mumbai garment and rock-salt manufacturer with no ownership link to this Libas)
Market value / last valuation Not disclosed. Raised ₹150 crore ($18 million) from ICICI Venture’s IAF Series 5 fund, 30 May 2024 — its only institutional round to date
Key shareholders or CEO Keshwani family (founders/promoters) and ICICI Venture (IAF Series 5); CEO Sidhant Keshwani

What they do

Libas sells women’s ethnic and fusion clothing — kurtas, suits, sarees and co-ord sets, mostly priced between ₹500 and ₹8,000 — to working and semi-urban Indian women who want Indian wear that looks current, fits consistently and can be worn on a weekday, not just a wedding. It sells through its own website and app, through marketplaces (Myntra, Flipkart, Amazon Fashion, Nykaa Fashion, TataCliq), and increasingly through its own stores and large-format retail shelf space, plus newer sub-brands for plus-size (Libas Extra Love), festive/premium (Libas Art) and children’s wear (Libas Kids).

The origin

Sidhant Keshwani grew up around a manufacturing floor. His father, Sunil Keshwani, had built an apparel manufacturing business from scratch since the mid-1980s, and dinner-table conversation ran to supply chains and fabric costs rather than homework. Sidhant went to the University of Manchester to study economics and came back to India around 2012 convinced that e-commerce would define his generation. His first attempt at proving it had nothing to do with ethnic wear: a venture shipping products from India to buyers in the UK, built over roughly nine months on a website that would take a day or two to spin up today. It failed, and it left him holding inventory nobody in Britain wanted.

What he did with that leftover stock is the reason Libas exists. Rather than write it off, he listed it on an Indian online marketplace. It sold out in two days. That single data point — instant, overwhelming domestic demand for a product he had built for someone else’s market — sent him looking for what Indian buyers, and specifically Indian women, actually wanted online. His research turned up a detail bigger brands had missed: even in corporate offices, women reached for kurtas over shirts and western wear far more often than retailers assumed, and there was no consistent, reliably-sized, reasonably-priced online option built for that habit. Using his father’s manufacturing unit as an exclusive early supplier, he launched Libas in 2014 around a single proposition — ₹500-₹800 workwear kurtas, sized and finished consistently enough to buy online without trying them on.

The struggle years

Libas’s growth was not a straight line. It was funded by cash flow alone for roughly a decade, and it hit at least two moments that forced the business to change shape rather than simply grow.

None of these were softened by good press at the time. Each one changed how the company sourced, sold or spent money going forward.

The turning point

The hinge moment was small and almost accidental: the two-day sellout of stock nobody in the UK wanted. Before it, Keshwani had a failed shipping business and a warehouse of inventory with no obvious buyer. After it, he had proof — inside 48 hours — that Indian consumers would buy Indian-relevant clothing online at volume, and a specific hypothesis about which product (kurtas) and which buyer (working women underserved by both traditional ethnic retailers and western-wear e-commerce) to chase. Every structural decision that followed — using the family factory as first supplier, pricing at ₹500-₹800, and building for repeat, not just occasion, wear — traces back to that one liquidation.

The money behind it

How it makes money

Libas is a manufacturer-retailer, not a marketplace: it designs, sources and sells its own garments rather than taking a commission on other sellers’ goods, so there is no “take rate” in the marketplace sense — the closest equivalent is the commission it pays out to Myntra, Flipkart, Amazon and other platforms on the roughly 40% of ecommerce revenue that still flows through them, which is precisely why the company has spent years pushing buyers toward its own app and website instead. Money comes in from selling finished garments across marketplaces, its own D2C channels, physical stores and, most recently, quick-commerce apps. Money goes out overwhelmingly on the product itself: in FY24, raw material and manufacturing cost alone was ₹296 crore, 61% of total expenses and up 41% year-on-year, by far the single largest line item (Entrackr, May 2025, citing Registrar of Companies filings).

The part people tend to get wrong is assuming a ₹500 crore-plus revenue label is comfortably profitable. It is not, by design, right now. FY24 advertising spend surged 121% year-on-year to ₹42 crore and employee costs rose 56% to ₹28 crore, squeezing EBITDA margin down to just 3.06% even in a profit year; logistics and shipping added a further ₹49 crore (Entrackr, May 2025). Keshwani has been explicit that owning the customer relationship, not the marketplace listing, is the point: “For any brand, if you want to communicate, you need to own the consumer data” — the stated logic behind shifting spend from marketplace commissions toward its own app and stores, even where that costs more per order in the short run (Inc42, 2026).

The numbers

Figures below are revenue from operations and profit/loss after tax, in ₹ crore, as reported in company filings and cited by Entrackr and Inc42.

Fiscal year Revenue (₹ crore) Profit / (loss) after tax (₹ crore)
FY23 352 14
FY24 486.5 4.8
FY25 609.1 (16.5)

Where the money comes from

The risks

The takeaway

The instructive part of Libas is not the ₹1,000 crore run-rate headline; it is what the company did with a two-day sellout of stock nobody wanted. Most founders would have called that a lucky salvage and moved on. Keshwani treated it as data and rebuilt an entire company around the two facts it revealed — that Indian buyers would move fast online, and that kurtas specifically were underserved. The harder lesson sits in the numbers that came after: the same aggression that turns a small signal into a ₹1,000 crore business is the aggression that can turn a decade of quiet profitability into a loss-making year almost overnight. Reading a small signal correctly gets you to scale; it does not, on its own, tell you when to stop spending to chase it.

Frequently asked questions

What does Libas sell and who is it for?

Libas sells women’s ethnic and fusion wear — kurtas, suits, sarees and co-ord sets, mostly priced ₹500 to ₹8,000 — aimed at working and semi-urban Indian women who want consistently sized, current-looking Indian wear for everyday use, not just festive occasions.

Who founded Libas and when?

The Keshwani family’s apparel manufacturing business dates to the mid-1980s under Sunil Keshwani. His son, Sidhant Keshwani, became CEO in 2013 and built Libas into a standalone online-first ethnic wear brand from 2014, after an earlier UK-facing e-commerce venture of his had failed.

How much funding has Libas raised?

Libas has raised ₹150 crore ($18 million) in total, in a single round from ICICI Venture’s IAF Series 5 fund on 30 May 2024, after roughly a decade of being funded entirely by its own cash flow.

Is Libas profitable?

Not currently. It was profitable through FY24 (₹4.8 crore profit on ₹486.5 crore revenue) but swung to a ₹16.5 crore net loss in FY25 on ₹609.1 crore revenue, as spending on stores, marketing and new channels outpaced sales growth.

Is Libas planning an IPO?

Trade reports from 2026 describe Libas exploring a public listing on a roughly two-to-three-year horizon, alongside aggressive store and quick-commerce expansion, but no draft filing or confirmed IPO timeline has been reported by the company itself.

Sources

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

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