Four employees at a Mumbai financial research firm pooled ₹5.5 lakh in 2013 to sell officially licensed Marvel and DC T-shirts in a country where almost nobody bothered to license anything properly. Twelve years on, that side project closed FY25 (year ended March 2025) with ₹492 crore ($51.3 million) in revenue and an ₹11 crore profit — a profit that was actually down 37.6% from the year before, even as sales grew 37%.
The company is The Souled Store, and it now describes itself as India’s largest destination for officially licensed pop-culture merchandise. It has survived a pandemic, a self-inflicted 52-times net-loss blowout, and a founder-admitted addiction to influencer marketing that produced no returns. It has also, more recently, quietly flipped its own business model: the licensed T-shirts that built the brand now account for less than half its sales. This is the story of how a compliance cost — paying for a licence everyone else was faking — became a decade-long moat, and what happens as that moat starts to run out.
Quick facts
| Company | The Souled Store Pvt. Ltd. |
| Founded | 2013, Mumbai |
| Founder(s) | Vedang Patel, Aditya Sharma, Rohin Samtaney and Harsh Lal |
| Businesses | Licensed pop-culture apparel and accessories (Marvel, DC, Disney, Harry Potter, anime, IPL teams) plus a growing own-design casualwear line, sold via app/website, own retail stores and marketplaces |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹492 crore, FY25 (year ended March 2025), up 37% year on year |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Net profit ₹11 crore, FY25 — down 37.6% from ₹17.67 crore in FY24 |
| Listed | Private. Reported to be preparing for an IPO, with a draft filing expected around late 2026 |
| Market value / last valuation | Not officially disclosed. Private trackers put it at roughly ₹817 crore to ₹1,420 crore ($8.5–14.8 million per ₹100 crore, i.e. about $85–148 million), as of funding activity in 2024 |
| Key shareholders / CEO | Co-founder Vedang Patel is CEO; founders held about 56% as of May 2024, with Elevation Capital and Xponentia Capital Partners as lead institutional backers |
What they do
The Souled Store designs, sources and sells casual apparel and accessories — T-shirts, hoodies, phone cases, backpacks, socks, mugs — built around two things: licensed pop-culture characters (Marvel, DC, Disney, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Naruto, One Piece and IPL teams among them) and, increasingly, its own original designs that carry no licence at all. It sells primarily to Indian Gen Z and millennial shoppers through its own app and website, through a fast-growing network of its own retail stores, and through online marketplaces. The company says it has more than 5 million registered app users and, as of March 2023, generated roughly 70% of revenue directly through its own website and app, 15% through offline retail and 15% through marketplaces such as Amazon and Myntra, as per BusinessToday’s reporting on its 2023 fundraise. Sixty percent of that revenue came from outside India’s ten largest cities, according to the same disclosure — a pop-culture brand that is, commercially, more small-town than its Instagram feed suggests.
The origin
Vedang Patel, Aditya Sharma, Rohin Samtaney and Harsh Lal were colleagues at TresVista, a Mumbai financial research firm, in their early twenties — three engineers and one lawyer, by their own description, none of them with any background in retail, e-commerce or apparel. As per BusinessToday’s November 2023 profile of the founders, the frustration that started the company was simple: Indian fans of Marvel, DC, Star Wars or Harry Potter in 2013 had exactly two options — pay import prices for the real thing, or buy a poor-quality knockoff at a street stall, because no one was licensing this content properly for the Indian market. The founders pooled ₹5.5 lakh of personal savings, stored the first batch of T-shirts in a cupboard, and put a small, curated range of 10 to 15 designs online. Early demand was erratic rather than triumphant: reporting on the founding period describes a first week of roughly 100 orders followed by a second week of just five, a reminder that the idea took longer to prove out than the origin story usually implies. What made the model different from the outset, and what the founders leaned into for the next decade, was that they paid licensors for the rights rather than printing characters without permission, the way most of the market did at the time.
The struggle years
The company was bootstrapped for its first five years, reaching roughly ₹30 crore in annual revenue by 2018 without external capital, per the company’s own account of that period reported by Equentis in May 2025. It then hit two distinct crises, four years apart, that tested whether the business could survive at all.
The first was the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020. Summer is The Souled Store’s busiest selling season; the lockdown wiped it out with cancelled orders and zero deliveries, and, as YourStory reported in September 2020, the company had no liquidity to fall back on. It kept the lights on by holding revenue at 30–35% of pre-pandemic levels to cover salaries, and pivoted into an unglamorous essential category: masks, including a batch made for the Mumbai Police, with proceeds directed to COVID-relief efforts. By the second half of 2020 the company had recovered to around one lakh orders a month with an average basket size of ₹1,000, according to the same report.
The second crisis was self-inflicted, and worse on paper. In FY22 (the year ended March 2022), fresh off a ₹70–75 crore Series B round led by Elevation Capital, the company pushed hard for growth: advertising and marketing spend nearly tripled to ₹47.49 crore, employee benefit costs more than doubled to ₹19.01 crore, discounts ran as high as 20%, and, as Inc42 reported in May 2023, the company spent more than ₹8 crore on influencer marketing that the founders later admitted produced no measurable return. Revenue did grow, up 82.3% to ₹145.1 crore from ₹79.59 crore in FY21. But the company swung from a wafer-thin net profit of ₹51.27 lakh in FY21 to a net loss of ₹26.72 crore in FY22 — a 52-times deterioration in a single year, at a negative 10% EBITDA margin. It was, by the founders’ own later admission, growth bought at a price the business could not sustain.
The turning point
The correction took roughly two years and shows up cleanly in the filings. In FY23 (year ended March 2023), revenue grew again, to about ₹235 crore, but the company was still in the red, posting a net loss of ₹16.5 crore even as it claimed a swing to a 2% positive EBITDA margin — the gap between the two numbers reflecting the cost of unwinding the FY22 excess rather than a clean recovery. Behind that number was a real change in operating discipline: discounting was capped at a maximum of 7%, down from 20%; the influencer-marketing line was effectively shut down; and the company said it re-pointed its spending from acquiring new customers to retaining existing ones, citing an annualised repeat-purchase rate that multiple company disclosures have put well above 100% — as high as 130% in FY24 commentary and 200% in later reporting.
The payoff landed in FY24 (year ended March 2024). Revenue jumped 54.5% to ₹360 crore, and the company swung to a net profit of ₹17.67 crore — as per Entrackr’s analysis of the company’s MCA filings — its first profitable year since FY21 and a reversal of nearly ₹45 crore in bottom-line swing from the FY22 low. Eighteen stores were operating by the end of that fiscal year. The lesson the founders drew, in their own words to Inc42, was that “growth and profitability are not necessarily different, and both can happen simultaneously” — provided the growth is paid for out of unit economics rather than discounting and influencer spend.
The money behind it
The Souled Store ran without institutional capital for five years. Its first outside money came in November 2018 from RPSG Capital Ventures, the venture arm of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, which put in an initial round reported at around ₹10 crore — enough to move the company beyond a T-shirts-only catalogue into a wider accessories range. In August 2021, Elevation Capital led a ₹70–75 crore round (reported by Business Standard and Forbes India as a Series B), with participation from angel investors including Delhivery co-founder and CEO Sahil Barua, former Zalora CEO Gunjan Soni, Livspace co-founder Ramakant Sharma and Urban Ladder founder Ashish Goel — capital that, as detailed above, immediately funded the aggressive FY22 growth push. The largest round to date came in March 2023: ₹135 crore ($16.4 million), led by Xponentia Capital Partners, with existing backers Elevation Capital and RPSG Capital increasing their stakes, as reported by YourStory and BusinessToday. The company said the funds would support opening more than 100 physical stores over the following two years and a full buyback of vested employee stock options.
Across these disclosed and undisclosed rounds, private-market trackers including Tracxn and Entrackr put total funding raised at close to $29.7 million (roughly ₹250 crore at current exchange rates). The company has never officially disclosed a valuation at any round. Two separate estimates put it in different places: Tracxn’s tracking placed the mark at about ₹1,420 crore as of May 2024, while Equentis, reporting in May 2025, cited a lower ₹817 crore valuation tied to funding activity in September 2024. Neither figure is confirmed by the company, and the gap between them — roughly $85 million to $148 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 — is itself a reminder that pre-IPO marks for a company that does not disclose valuations should be read as estimates, not facts. As of May 2024, per Tracxn’s shareholding data, the four founders together still held about 56% of the company, with institutional funds holding roughly 39% and an ESOP pool around 4%. In April 2025, The Souled Store acquired rival pop-culture merchandise brand Redwolf — founded in 2011 by Ameya Thakur, Rahul Jaisheel and Vivek Malhotra — on undisclosed financial terms, consolidating two of India’s better-known licensed-merchandise players under one roof.
How it makes money
The mechanics are straightforward to describe and expensive to run. The company licenses intellectual property — more than 200 licences at last count, spanning Marvel, DC, Disney, Harry Potter, anime franchises such as Naruto and One Piece, and IPL cricket teams — designs apparel and accessories around each property, has them manufactured, and sells them at a premium to unbranded basics but well below imported official merchandise. Licence agreements of this kind typically carry minimum guarantee payments and royalty rates that climb as sales scale, meaning the cost of the “official” label rises precisely as the business it protects gets bigger. That is the part people tend to get wrong: because the product is “just a printed T-shirt,” it is assumed to carry retail-apparel-style margins. In practice, FY25 filings show the company spent close to ₹0.99 to generate every ₹1 of revenue, for an EBITDA margin of 9.7% and a return on capital employed of 7%, as per Entrackr’s December 2025 analysis — a business with real royalty, procurement, marketing and now retail-rent costs eating into a product that looks, on the shelf, like simple merchandise.
The more significant shift is in the sales mix itself. According to reporting attributed to The Ken in early 2024, licensed merchandise made up more than 80% of sales in the company’s first six to seven years; by 2024, non-licensed, in-house-designed merchandise accounted for more than 55% of sales. In effect, the licensed catalogue built the traffic and the trust — fans came for officially licensed Naruto or Marvel gear — while the company’s own casualwear designs, unencumbered by royalty payments, have become the larger and structurally more profitable half of the business. The trade-off is that the own-brand half loses the licence-driven differentiation and competes more directly, on price and design alone, with value fast-fashion chains such as Zudio and premium casualwear labels such as Rare Rabbit.
The numbers
Figures below are as reported in company filings analysed by Entrackr and Inc42, unless stated otherwise. All figures in ₹ crore.
| Fiscal year | Revenue (₹ crore) | Net profit / (loss) (₹ crore) |
|---|---|---|
| FY22 (year ended Mar 2022) | 145.1 | (26.72) |
| FY23 (year ended Mar 2023) | ~235 | (16.5) |
| FY24 (year ended Mar 2024) | 360 | 17.67 |
| FY25 (year ended Mar 2025) | 492 | 11 |
Two things stand out. First, the swing from a ₹26.72 crore loss in FY22 to a ₹17.67 crore profit in FY24 came alongside revenue roughly two-and-a-half times higher, i.e. growth and discipline arriving together rather than in sequence. Second, FY25’s profit decline — down 37.6% even as revenue grew 37% — shows that the discipline established after FY22 is not permanent: Entrackr’s December 2025 reporting attributes the FY25 dip specifically to higher employee benefit costs and marketing spend, the same two line items that caused the FY22 blowout, now rising again as the company funds its store-expansion push.
Where the money comes from
Three splits matter here, and each contains a mild surprise. By channel, as of the company’s March 2023 disclosure, about 70% of revenue came through its own app and website, 15% through offline retail and 15% through online marketplaces — a mix that is likely to have shifted toward offline given the retail push since. By geography, 60% of revenue came from outside India’s top ten cities as of the same disclosure, which cuts against the assumption that a pop-culture, English-language, Gen Z brand is a metro phenomenon. By product, the more consequential split is the one described above: licensed merchandise, which built the brand’s identity and initial traffic, has fallen from over 80% of sales in the company’s first six to seven years to under 45% by 2024, while non-licensed, in-house designs now make up the majority. The physical retail footprint has grown from 18 stores at the end of FY24 to 36 exclusive outlets by late 2024, per IndiaRetailing’s reporting, with the company targeting 60 stores by the end of that fiscal year, 120 by December 2025 and 200 by December 2026 — plus its first store outside India, in the Middle East, targeted for 2025.
The risks
Three risks are worth naming plainly, because the company’s own numbers point to each of them.
The licence is rented, not owned. Every Marvel, Disney or IPL licence comes up for renewal, and minimum guarantees and royalty rates tend to climb with scale — nothing prevents a licensor from placing the same intellectual property with a competitor at the next cycle. This is the structural risk behind the entire first decade of the business, and it is the reason the shift toward owned, non-licensed design (now the majority of sales) matters as much as it does.
Margins are thin and cyclical. A 9.7% EBITDA margin and a FY25 profit decline of 37.6% on 37% revenue growth show that profitability here is not a settled state; it moves with marketing and employee spend, the same two costs that produced the FY22 near-collapse. Store expansion toward a 200-outlet target by December 2026 will add fixed rent and staffing costs before it adds proportional revenue, which is exactly the kind of spending that has twice already dented the company’s bottom line.
Competitive intensity is rising on the side of the business with no licence to protect it. As the non-licensed casualwear share of sales grows past half the business, that half competes directly with value fast-fashion chains such as Zudio and premium casual labels such as Rare Rabbit on price and design alone, in a licensed and unlicensed apparel category that industry commentary describes as fragmented across several hundred competing brands of varying scale in India.
The takeaway
The most transferable lesson here is not “get licences” or “control discounting,” though both mattered. It is that a compliance cost, paid early and consistently when competitors are cutting corners, can function as a moat for a decade — but a rented moat still expires. The Souled Store spent ten years building trust on licences it paid for while others faked theirs, and it used that decade to build the retention, design and retail capability that now lets more than half its sales happen without paying a licensor at all. The harder discipline was not signing the first Marvel deal in 2013; it was two years of controlled, less exciting growth after 2022, cutting discounts and influencer spend that looked fine on a slide deck but did not survive contact with a profit-and-loss statement.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded The Souled Store and when?
The Souled Store was founded in 2013 by Vedang Patel, Aditya Sharma, Rohin Samtaney and Harsh Lal, four colleagues at Mumbai financial research firm TresVista who pooled ₹5.5 lakh in personal savings to start the business, as per BusinessToday’s November 2023 profile of the founders.
Is The Souled Store profitable?
Yes, but the trend is worth watching. The company turned profitable in FY24 (year ended March 2024) with a net profit of ₹17.67 crore, and remained profitable in FY25 with ₹11 crore in net profit — a decline of 37.6% year on year even as revenue grew 37% to ₹492 crore, according to Entrackr’s analysis of its filings published in December 2025.
Who are The Souled Store’s biggest investors?
Elevation Capital, which led a ₹70–75 crore round in August 2021, and Xponentia Capital Partners, which led the company’s largest disclosed round of ₹135 crore in March 2023, are its lead institutional backers. RPSG Capital Ventures was the company’s first institutional investor in November 2018 and increased its stake in later rounds.
Is The Souled Store planning an IPO?
The company has signalled IPO intent, though timelines vary by report. Equentis reported in May 2025 that the company was eyeing a roughly ₹2,000 crore IPO within about 18 months and was in the process of engaging bankers, while other industry reporting has pointed to a draft filing around late 2026 and a listing as far out as 2027–28. As of this writing, no draft red herring prospectus has been filed.
How does The Souled Store’s licensing business model work?
The company pays for official licences — more than 200 of them, spanning Marvel, DC, Disney, Harry Potter, anime franchises and IPL teams — to design and sell apparel and accessories under those properties, rather than selling unlicensed prints the way much of the Indian market historically did. Licence costs typically include minimum guarantees and royalties that rise with sales volume. Over time, the company has grown a second, non-licensed casualwear line that, by 2024, accounted for more than half its sales.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- BusinessToday, “Three engineers, one lawyer: How merchandise brand The Souled Store came to life” — November 2023
- BusinessToday, “The Souled Store raises Rs 135 crore; plans to expand product offerings, open 100 stores” — March 2023
- YourStory, “The Souled Store raises $16.4M in Series C round” — March 2023
- YourStory, “How The Souled Store survived and revived amidst the lockdown to touch one lakh orders a month” — September 2020
- Business Standard, “Youth apparel brand The Souled Store raises Rs 75 cr in Series B funding” — August 2021
- Inc42, “How D2C Brand The Souled Store Soared To Profitability After Slumping To 52x Losses” — May 2023
- Inc42, “The Souled Store FY25: Profit Falls 38% To INR 11 Cr Despite 37% Revenue Growth” — December 2025
- Entrackr, “The Souled Store approaches Rs 150 Cr revenue in FY22” — April 2023
- Entrackr, “Elevation-backed The Souled Store turns profitable in FY24” — 2024
- Entrackr, “The Souled Store nears Rs 500 Cr revenue in FY25; profits decline 38%” — December 2025
- IndiaRetailing, “By December 2026, The Souled Store expects to have about 200 stores: Co-Founder Harsh Lal” — December 2024
- IndiaRetailing, “The Souled Store to open first global store in the Middle East this year” — January 2025
- Equentis, “From Star Wars Chats to IPO Plans: The ₹360 Cr Journey of The Souled Store” — May 2025
- Inc42, “The Souled Store Buys Redwolf To Boost Presence In Pop Culture Merchandise Space” — April 2025
- Behind The Feature, “The Souled Store paid for the licences everyone else faked” — 2025
- The Ken, reporting on The Souled Store’s licensed vs non-licensed sales mix — March 2024
- Tracxn, The Souled Store company and shareholding profile — accessed September 2026
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