Startup Deep Dive : The Label Life — from celebrity-curated fashion to a 90% sale

In 2013, a former fashion journalist with no engineering degree and a self-taught crash course in e-commerce, gathered from Quora threads and Google searches, launched an online store where the product recommendations came not from an algorithm but from three Bollywood women. Nine years later, in January 2022, that business, Label Corp Private Limited, sold a 90% stake to a Tiger Global-backed house-of-brands roll-up, and its founder stepped back to an advisory role.

The Label Life is a study in a bet that felt contrarian in 2013 and now looks ordinary: that taste, curated by named humans, could out-sell infinite choice. It reached a company-stated ₹2 crore of monthly sales by 2017, raised money four times, and then handed the keys to a professional operator. This is what it built, what it never quite cracked, and why the standalone company’s reported revenue has since fallen close to zero.

Quick facts

What The Label Life does

The Label Life is a direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand that sells its own private-label women’s clothing, accessories, footwear and home decor through TheLabelLife.com and marketplaces. Its distinguishing pitch was never the catalogue size. It was curation: collections presented as the personal picks of named celebrities rather than the output of a recommendation engine. In the founder’s own framing, a shopper is more likely to trust an outfit that Malaika Arora would wear than one an internet algorithm surfaces. The company designs and sources most of what it sells, which is what lets it hold the brand and the margin in one place.

The origin: content before commerce

Preeta Sukhtankar did not arrive from a tech background. She had spent years inside Indian fashion media as a writer at Elle, a publisher associated with titles such as L’Officiel India and Seventeen, a television producer at MTV, and later in celebrity management. That vantage point gave her the founding insight: Indian women were being sold either mass-market fashion or intimidating luxury, with little in between that felt personally recommended.

Her answer was to fuse content and commerce. Instead of a plain store, she recruited well-known women as “taste-makers” who would put their names to curated edits. The early structure ran as separate verticals, The Closet Label for clothing, The Home Label for decor, and The Trunk Label for accessories, before being consolidated into a single The Label Life brand. She taught herself the mechanics of running an online business, by her own account leaning on Quora and Google, and started with a handful of people working out of a friend’s home before moving to a Bandra office. The company that formalised all this, Label Corp Private Limited, was incorporated in Mumbai on 18 December 2012.

The struggle years

The business was not a straight line. Two setbacks the founder has described publicly stand out. In one, a roughly $2 million investment commitment collapsed days before it was due to close, a reversal she has called her worst day, made worse by losing a bag with her cards and identity documents the same day. In another, a warehouse manager walked off the job with a strike three days before Diwali, the peak season for a fashion retailer, forcing her to step in personally to keep orders moving.

Beneath the anecdotes sat a harder structural problem. Curated, private-label fashion is capital-hungry: you carry inventory, you eat markdowns on what does not sell, and you fund customer acquisition against thin repeat rates. The Label Life stayed relatively small through the late 2010s, raising modest rounds rather than the large war chests that horizontal marketplaces commanded, and by the turn of the decade it turned to revenue-based financing to fund growth without heavy dilution. That is the profile of a brand fighting for oxygen in a market where scale, and the capital behind it, increasingly decided who survived.

The turning point: the 2022 sale

The single decisive event in the company’s history is the acquisition announced on 18 January 2022, when GOAT Brand Labs, a house-of-brands roll-up backed by Tiger Global, acquired a 90% stake in The Label Life for an undisclosed amount. On one side of that date sat an independent, founder-run brand that had reached a company-stated ₹2 crore in monthly sales in 2017 and served, on its own telling, tens of thousands of customers. On the other side sat a brand slotted into a portfolio alongside Chumbak and others, with a new owner publicly targeting ₹500 crore in revenue by 2025 and expansion into jewellery, beauty, personal care and loungewear.

The human side of the deal was equally clear. Founder Preeta Sukhtankar moved to an advisory role. Co-founders Yashika Punjabee and Sonam Shah joined GOAT Brand Labs. The brand stayed; the independent company effectively stopped being the vehicle. That is the cleanest way to read the numbers that followed, examined below.

The money behind it

The Label Life raised money in a handful of steps rather than one blockbuster round. The reported shape:

• 2013, angel: about ₹1 crore in initial angel investment, per the founder’s own account.
• 2013, seed: roughly $1 million (reported as about $1.09 million) from Kalaari Capital, its earliest institutional backer.
• Undisclosed interim round: a further amount reported at around $500,000.
• December 2017, growth: ₹20 crore from Kalpavriksh, the private-equity arm of financial-services group Centrum; Niraj Shah of Kalpavriksh joined the board. Individual investors Mithun Sacheti (CaratLane co-founder) and Haresh Chawla are also named among backers.
• January 2021, revenue-based financing: an undisclosed amount facilitated through Klub, a revenue-based financing marketplace.

Totals differ by source: Inc42 reports about $3.1 million raised, while Crunchbase puts it near $5.14 million across roughly six rounds. Treat the exact figure as reported, not audited. What matters is the pattern: this was a lean, staged raise, not a mega-funded land grab, which is precisely why an eventual sale to a better-capitalised operator made strategic sense.

How it makes money

The Label Life is a vertically integrated private-label brand, and its economics follow from that choice:

• Money in: direct sales of own-brand apparel, footwear, accessories and home decor, at retail prices, through its website and marketplaces.
• The margin lever: because it designs and sources its own products rather than reselling other labels, it captures the brand markup itself. Private-label goods structurally carry higher gross margins than reselling national brands, which is the whole point of owning the label.
• Costs out: product sourcing and manufacturing, inventory that ties up cash and risks markdowns, warehousing and fulfilment, returns (high in fashion), and digital marketing to acquire buyers.
• The curation premium: celebrity “style editor” collections are the differentiator meant to justify price and lift conversion versus a generic catalogue, in place of a take rate a marketplace would earn.
• The part people get wrong: the celebrities were positioned as creative collaborators, not paid endorsers with a founder’s stake, so this was a brand-and-inventory business, with a media sensibility, rather than an influencer arrangement.

The numbers

Honest caveat first: The Label Life was a private company, and clean, audited year-by-year revenue for its independent period (roughly FY18 to FY21) is not reliably available in public sources, so it is not reproduced here. What is public is the standalone legal entity’s recent filings, and one company-stated run-rate from 2017. The recent figures tell the post-acquisition story: after GOAT Brand Labs took 90% in January 2022, trading migrated to the acquirer’s operating structure and the standalone entity, Label Corp Private Limited, was left with negligible activity.

Read plainly: the near-total collapse in the standalone entity’s revenue between FY24 and FY25 is not a business failure, it is the mechanical result of the brand being run through the parent after the 2022 sale. Anyone quoting “The Label Life’s revenue” today should be clear about whether they mean the near-dormant legal entity or the brand’s sales inside GOAT Brand Labs.

Where the money comes from

By product and channel, the picture at and after acquisition was:

• Core categories at the time of sale: apparel, accessories, footwear and home goods, all under one private label.
• Planned expansion under GOAT: jewellery, beauty, personal care and loungewear, categories the acquirer named publicly in January 2022.
• Channel: primarily direct-to-consumer via its own website, supplemented by marketplaces, rather than a large owned-store footprint.
• Geography: India-focused, with the new owner citing global expansion as an ambition rather than an existing base.

The surprise sits in the ownership chart. The famous faces, Malaika Arora, Sussanne Khan and Bipasha Basu, drove the brand’s identity and marketing pull, but the founding equity and operating control rested with Preeta Sukhtankar and her co-founders, and then with GOAT Brand Labs. The brand people associate with celebrities was, in cap-table terms, a founder-and-institutional-investor story.

The risks

• Inventory and markdown risk: as a private-label fashion business it owns what it makes. Unsold seasonal stock becomes discounted stock, and fashion return rates are high, both of which compress the gross margin that private labelling is supposed to protect.
• Dependence on curator relationships: the entire differentiation rests on named celebrities lending taste and reach. If a key style editor exits or their public appeal fades, the brand loses the exact thing that separates it from a generic D2C label, with no algorithmic moat to fall back on.
• Loss of independent identity inside a house of brands: now that the brand sits within GOAT Brand Labs’ portfolio, its fate is tied to the parent’s capital allocation and priorities across many brands. GOAT’s own holding entity reported a net loss of about ₹10 crore on roughly ₹19.3 crore of revenue in FY24, a reminder that the roll-up model is itself still proving its economics.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson is about knowing which game you are actually good at. Preeta Sukhtankar was a superb brand and content builder who spotted a real gap, curated taste for Indian women, years before the influencer-commerce wave made it obvious. What she did not have, and chose not to chase to the bitter end, was the mountain of capital and operational muscle that scaling a private-label fashion brand to hundreds of crores demands. Selling 90% to an operator built for exactly that scaling was not a defeat; it was a founder matching the right owner to the next phase. The uncomfortable footnote is that the standalone company’s numbers now read as near-zero, a reminder that a brand can outlive the company that created it, and that “what happened to the revenue” often has a boring, structural answer rather than a dramatic one.

Frequently asked questions

Who founded The Label Life?

The Label Life was founded by Preeta Sukhtankar, a former fashion journalist and media executive, who ran the legal entity Label Corp Private Limited (incorporated in Mumbai on 18 December 2012). Yashika Punjabee and Sonam Shah are named as co-founders. Malaika Arora, Sussanne Khan and Bipasha Basu were “style editors” or curators, not founders.

Is The Label Life still an independent company?

No. In January 2022, GOAT Brand Labs, a Tiger Global-backed house-of-brands company, acquired a 90% stake in The Label Life for an undisclosed amount. The founder moved to an advisory role, and the brand now operates within GOAT’s portfolio alongside brands such as Chumbak.

How much money did The Label Life raise?

Reported totals range from about $3.1 million (Inc42) to about $5.14 million (Crunchbase). Named steps include seed funding of roughly $1 million from Kalaari Capital in 2013, ₹20 crore from Kalpavriksh (Centrum) in December 2017, and undisclosed revenue-based financing via Klub in January 2021.

Why is The Label Life’s reported revenue so low now?

The standalone legal entity, Label Corp Private Limited, reported roughly ₹10 lakh in FY24 and about ₹3,000 in FY25. This reflects trading moving into the acquirer’s operating structure after the 2022 sale, not a measure of the brand’s actual sales inside GOAT Brand Labs.

What made The Label Life different from other online fashion stores?

Its model put human curation ahead of algorithmic recommendation. Collections were presented as the personal edits of well-known celebrities, and the company sold its own private-label products, so it controlled both the brand and the margin rather than reselling other labels.

Sources

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

• ZaubaCorp / The Company Check — Label Corp Private Limited, CIN U74999MH2012PTC234663 (incorporation, directors, capital), accessed September 2026
• Inc42 — The Label Life company and financials profile (FY24 and FY25 revenue and loss; total funding), September 2026
• Crunchbase — The Label Life organization profile (funding total and rounds), September 2026
• Entrackr — “Label Life secures Rs 20 Cr from Kalpavriksh,” December 2017
• Open The Magazine — profile of Preeta Sukhtankar, founder and CEO (background, business model, early setbacks)
• YourStory — The Label Life coverage, including the January 2021 Klub funding alert and 2017 TechSparks interview
• India Retailing — “GOAT Brand acquires 90% stakes in fashion brand The Label Life,” January 2022
• Indian Retailer — “Goat Brand Labs acquires 90pc stake in The Label Life” (categories, plans, executive quotes), January 2022
• Entrackr / YourStory / Inc42 — GOAT Brand Labs financials and funding (FY22 and FY24 revenue and loss; total raised), 2023–2024

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