Hitting ₹120 Cr Selling Only Pants | Dhruv Toshniwal, The Pant Project

Shirts are 2x the market. Pants are 200x less crowded. Dhruv Toshniwal bet on the category everyone treats as an afterthought, and built The Pant Project into a ₹120 Cr run-rate D2C brand.

Dhruv grew up around a 50-year-old textile business, Banswara Syntex. He studied finance at Wharton, spent four years at Oliver Wyman in New York, then came home to build something of his own. The first two brands he tried inside the family business didn't work. The third idea was pants.

The Pant Project started as a custom-made pants brand in the middle of COVID. It got stuck around ₹30 Cr. Then ready-to-wear took off, and today it's 85% of the business, doing about ₹10 Cr a month in net sales.

In this episode of the Founder Thesis podcast with Akshay Datt, Dhruv breaks down how Indian men actually buy trousers, why comfort beats logos in bottom wear, and what it takes to grow a D2C brand without burning cash.

What you'll learn

👉Why 80% of men's pants sales come from just five colours

👉How fit accuracy went from 75% to 93% using customer data

👉Why 60% of sales come from the brand's own website, not marketplaces

👉How marketing efficiency went from ₹1 to ₹4 of sales per ₹1 spent

👉The 700 sq ft store format that works, and why one trial room loses sales

👉How no-fade Ink Lock jeans grew denim to 25% of sales

👉Why Dhruv says raise late, raise little, and pick partners you trust