Company · Fashion & Retail
The Bootstrapped Bengaluru Label That Sold India on the Rs 3,000 Shirt
How Manish and Akshika Poddar turned a family garment factory's European know-how into one of India's fastest-growing premium fashion houses - and stayed bootstrapped until the numbers spoke for themselves.
Walk through almost any upmarket Indian mall and you will pass a storefront with a small rabbit stamped on the glass. Inside, the shirts run to about Rs 3,000 - too much for a fast-fashion habit, far less than an imported designer label. That in-between price is not an accident. It is the entire thesis of The House of Rare, the Bengaluru company behind Rare Rabbit, and the reason a business most venture capitalists ignored for years is now valued near USD 279 million.
The House of Rare designs, manufactures and sells premium apparel under four labels: Rare Rabbit for men, Rareism for women, Rare Ones for children, and Rare'z for footwear. It is run out of Bengaluru under the corporate name Radhamani Textiles, and it grew for most of its life without a rupee of outside money. In the fiscal year ending 2025 it reported revenue of roughly Rs 818 crore, up from Rs 637 crore the year before and Rs 376 crore the year before that.
01What the company actually does
Most Indian fashion startups pick a side. They go online-only, chase a single demographic, and buy customers with discounts. The House of Rare went the other way. It treats itself as a fashion house - a design and manufacturing operation first, a retailer second - and it sells across nearly every channel available: its own website and app, more than 180 exclusive brand outlets, several hundred multi-brand counters, and marketplaces. The product is contemporary, clean-lined clothing pitched as "accessible luxury," a phrase the brand uses to describe the gap between mass-market fast fashion and imported premium.
The manufacturing is not outsourced trivia; it is the foundation. The founding family came from garment production, and that heritage lets the company control fabric sourcing, fit and turnaround in-house rather than renting those capabilities from vendors. In a category where speed and consistency decide whether a customer comes back, owning the factory is the quiet advantage.
The result is a company that behaves less like a D2C brand and more like a traditional house of fashion that happens to be young. Collections rotate by season - summer and winter drops, festive and party edits, workwear and casual - and the range now stretches from t-shirts, polos and jeans through blazers, bandhgalas and suits to sneakers and loafers. The consistency across all of it is deliberate: a customer who buys a Rare Rabbit shirt should recognize the sensibility when they pick up a Rareism dress or a pair of Rare'z high-tops.
"The philosophy behind Rare Rabbit is simple: design is everything."Manish Poddar, Founder & CEO
02The man who designed for Europe first
Manish Poddar did not start with a pitch deck. From the mid-2000s he spent more than a decade designing for European labels - including work associated with Italian brands such as Miss Sixty and Gazzarrini - traveling to supply designs to fashion houses across the continent. That apprenticeship, rather than a business plan, is what he brought home. When he and his wife Akshika Poddar launched Rare Rabbit in 2015, the bet was that Indian consumers would pay for good design if someone actually gave it to them.
The brand name is its own conversation piece. A rabbit is one of the fastest-breeding animals on earth, and the founder has framed it as a metaphor - he wanted Indian men to embrace style without hesitation. It is an odd origin story for a company now measured in thousands of crores, and the founders have never smoothed it over.
03Who buys it
The core customer is the aspirational city Indian - broadly men aged roughly 22 to 40 for Rare Rabbit, with Rareism reaching women and Rare Ones extending to families. These are shoppers who have outgrown fast fashion but do not want to import a wardrobe. The scale of that audience shows up in the store count: 180-plus exclusive outlets and more than 700 points of sale, with expansion aimed at tier-II and tier-III cities such as Mysuru rather than only the metros.
That physical footprint matters more than it might for a purely online label. A premium price is easier to justify when a customer can feel the fabric and see the fit before paying, and the store network doubles as the brand's most persuasive advertising. Online, the company runs a Shopify storefront and a mobile app supported by tools like Netcore Unbxd for search and AppsFlyer for attribution - a modern stack behind an old-fashioned belief that clothes sell best when people can touch them.
Premium contemporary menswear: shirts, tees, jackets, blazers, business and ethnic wear.
Dresses, tops, workwear and co-ords for contemporary womenswear.
Everyday kidswear - denim, co-ords and accessories for children.
Sneakers, loafers and high-tops across men, women and kids.
04The problem it solves
For a long time the Indian premium wardrobe had a hole in the middle. Below it sat mass fast fashion; above it sat Zara, H&M and imported designer names that either felt generic or cost too much. There was no homegrown label at scale that delivered current design, reliable fit and a full-price story without the imported markup. The House of Rare built for that gap and, in doing so, helped make "accessible luxury" a recognizable category in India rather than a marketing line.
05How it is different
Competitors are easy to name - Snitch and Bewakoof online, Zara and H&M on the high street, Blackberrys and Being Human in the mall. What separates The House of Rare is less any single product than its structure. It is vertically integrated, so margin and fit stay in-house. It is offline-first in a category obsessed with e-commerce, which builds a brand you can touch. And it is a multi-brand house rather than a single label, spreading one supply chain across men, women, kids and footwear.
Its leverage in a fundraise was not the deck. It was not needing the deck.On raising after a decade of profitability
06The business model, and the money
The engine is straightforward: design and make premium clothing, sell it at largely full price - an average of around Rs 3,000 an item - through owned and partner channels, and reinvest. The company was profitable well before it raised, posting roughly Rs 32 crore of profit in FY23 and about Rs 75 crore in FY24. That profitability is what gave the founders the rare position of raising money on their own terms.
When capital finally came, the names were telling. In mid-2024 the company took its first institutional round of Rs 150 crore, backed by A91 Partners, real-estate-focused Gruhas, Nikhil Kamath's family office NkSquared, and the family office of Manyavar founder Ravi Modi. In February 2025 A91 added a further Rs 50 crore, lifting its stake to about 14% and pricing the company near USD 279 million. Two of the most credible read-throughs on Indian consumers and Indian apparel had bought in.
Manish Poddar begins over a decade designing for European labels, including work tied to Miss Sixty and Gazzarrini in Italy.
The Poddars launch Rare Rabbit in Bengaluru as a design-led premium menswear label.
The house expands into women's contemporary fashion.
Sales cross Rs 350 crore with Rs 32 crore profit; Rare Ones and Rare'z round out the portfolio.
Revenue climbs 69% to Rs 637 crore; the company raises Rs 150 crore from A91, Gruhas, NkSquared and the Modi family office.
A follow-on Rs 50 crore round from A91; FY25 revenue reaches about Rs 818 crore across 180+ stores.
07Where it sits in the market
India has 1.4 billion people and, until recently, no homegrown premium fashion house operating at real scale. The House of Rare is quietly filling that space. The open question is whether it can become India's first apparel unicorn - the jump from a roughly Rs 2,500 crore valuation to a billion dollars - by extending the same formula into womenswear, footwear and international markets. On the current curve, the numbers are doing the arguing.
There are real tests ahead. Womenswear is a more crowded and fickle market than menswear, and Rareism has to earn its own audience rather than lean on the Rare Rabbit halo. International expansion, which the founders have signaled using their European networks, is a different game from opening a store in a new Indian city. And a house that now carries outside investors will feel pressure to keep the revenue curve steep. But the starting position is unusual for an Indian consumer brand: profitable, vertically integrated, and built patiently enough that it got to choose when - and from whom - it took money.