How Koskii Is Rewriting The Ethnic Wear D2C Playbook

In 1991, at the age of 17, Umar Akhter worked at a sari store located in Kolar, a small town near Bengaluru. His father, reeling from heavy losses in his wholesale business, had rented the outlet as a lifeline. As the oldest of six siblings, he had no choice but to juggle studies and work to ease his family’s financial burden.

Despite the hardship, he learnt business fundamentals from family entrepreneurship at a time when ethnic retail pulsed through local markets and family-run stores that knew their customers by name. It was long before algorithms tracked fashion trends and customer journeys moved online. That beginning set the stage for Koskii (which means ‘girl’ in the Navayati language), a women’s ethnic wear brand rooted in tradition and intricate craftsmanship.

The backstory was a long one, though (more on that later). But Koskii, in its current avatar, was launched in June 2016 by four cofounders — Akhter (CEO), and his brothers Haroon Rashid (CPO) and Sameen Eajaz (COO) who joined later. Now, after a decade, it has emerged as an omnichannel D2C (direct-to-consumer) brand known for its bridal collections, festive wear and occasion-specific outfits. The product line has since expanded to include western wear and fusion styles, as the brand targets more local and global markets.

Koskii runs 30 stores across seven cities, including Delhi, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Coimbatore, Kochi and Pune. Its physical stores span 1.5 lakh sq. ft, and its internal numbers trace the scale of its rise. The brand claims more than 50K brides have donned its (Bollywood-inspired) lehengas, and overtime footfall across its stores is close to 5 Mn visitors.

Its digital business has emerged as a strong growth engine, delivering an annualised online revenue run-rate of INR 58 Cr with 50% YoY growth. Its digital storefronts attract 4.5 Mn monthly sessions, converting at a consistently strong average order value (AOV) of INR 4,500, with a broad national footprint — 30% from Tier 1, 25% from Tier 2, and 45% from Tier 3 audiences.

While most D2C brands are still struggling to build a stable offline business, Koskii has taken the reverse route, from a traditional, store-led business to a brand with a digital core. It has retained the ethos of a family business but operates as a structured, tech-enabled modern retailer.

Koskii follows a distributed sourcing model, working with a network of small manufacturers and designer-entrepreneurs across India instead of maintaining a large in-house design team. These partners create collections based on trend data and insights into customer preferences shared by the brand. “When you launch 100 designs, eight or 10 become heroes; that’s a fact,” said Akhter.

Using its integrated data and supply-chain platform, Koskii continuously analyses real-time sales, stock movement, and product performance across stores. The platform built as a proprietary SaaS-style system combining demand analytics, trend detection, and automated order management gives merchandisers and manufacturers instant visibility into what is selling and how fast.

Bestselling designs are immediately flagged and pushed into production through the shared vendor interface, which is connected to supplier systems for seamless order flow, lead-time tracking, and replenishment. This enables Koskii to stay agile, respond quickly to seasonal peaks, and efficiently phase out styles that underperform.

The brand closed FY25 with INR 150 Cr in revenue and expects to clock INR 200-240 Cr in FY26, a YoY rise of 33-60%. It is still in the red, posting a loss of 8-10% of revenue, primarily due to its expansion drive and front-loaded spending on the team, technology and marketing.

He acknowledged that the brand’s FY24 losses stemmed from an aggressive offline rollout in Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Kochi. “Offline does not pay off immediately. You need to give stores time to mature,” said Akhter. “But now we are seeing that payoff. Our like-for-like growth in some stores is 50-60%.”

When things went south for Akhter and his family in 1991, he did not give up. He helped his father at the store while completing his PUC (the pre-university course equivalent to Standard 11-12 ). He topped his class and later earned a master’s degree in commerce. Soon after, his grandfather, also a businessman, wanted to start a store in Dubai and asked Akhter to join him.

But after studying the market, he realised the risks and advised against the plan, a decision that unexpectedly changed his trajectory. During a dinner in Dubai, a family friend suggested he should learn software rather than pursue a career in retail. Soon after, Akhter returned to India and enrolled in a six-month Oracle course in Mysuru, where he was the only non-engineer in the batch. Three months later, he secured a job as a software engineer. “I thought if I could get an interview, I could also clear it,” he said.

Over the next 18 years, he built a global career in IT, working across the US, Canada, the UK and Central Europe. He eventually set up and led the Singapore operations of Thoughtworks, a global technology consultancy headquartered in Chicago.

However, the brush with the retail landscape had never left his mind.

In 2009, while still in the US, Akhter came across a chance to buy a store. He invested INR 14 Lakh, his entire savings, set aside to buy a family home for his mother. The new brand was called Mina Bazaar (not Meena Bazaar, a fashion brand that has existed since 1970). While he managed the business from abroad, Rashid mapped an expansion plan to open multiple outlets. By 2011, the brand had opened a second store with 1K sq. ft of retail space. A third followed in 2012, and a fourth in 2014.

Throughout these years, Akhter continued working in the IT sector, a career he would pursue until 2016. The business had grown sufficiently, and Eajaz left his corporate role at Philips to join the venture full-time.

When Akhter studied India’s apparel market up close, he noticed that most businesses were family-run and unorganised. On the other hand, established brands like Meena Bazaar lacked the tech-driven scalability he had seen abroad. His consulting experience gave him a clear view of the gap: India was ready for a modern, technology-led ethnic wear brand.

In 2016, he left his settled life in Singapore — the global role, the travel and the comfort — to return to India and rebuild from the ground up. “People thought I’d lost my mind leaving all that to sell saris,” he said. “But I saw what India was becoming, and I wanted to be part of it.”

That same year, as he widened the brand’s marketing efforts, Akhter realised that the name Mina Bazaar was too similar to another established chain. Rebranding became inevitable, and Koskii was born. The word comes from Navayati, the language of his community. It was a nod to both his roots and the women for whom the brand was created.

“The word ‘Koskii’ means ‘girl’ in Nawayati. It is the spoken language of the Nawayat community, whose roots can be traced to sea-faring merchants and mariners from Arabia or Persia whose ships anchored along the Uttara Kannada coastline several centuries ago. They settled here and handed down cultural and mercantile traditions that continue within the Nawayat community even today,” said Akhter.

With the new identity in place, Akhter opened two more stores in Bengaluru, taking the total count to six. Growth remained organic, with profits from older outlets funding every new store. By 2019, Koskii was well-established in Bengaluru.

Around this time, Akhter’s friend Mahesh Parasuraman, cofounder and partner at Amicus Capital, advised him on how to scale further. Acting on that guidance, he opened a store in Chennai, but Covid-19 hit the business soon after.

The pandemic brought everything to a halt. Koskii had seven stores, 250-300 employees and only INR 25 Lakh in the bank, barely enough to cover salaries for a month. With no clarity on how long the lockdowns would last, Akhter reached out to his contacts in China. Their warning was blunt: India could be closed for at least two months.

Realising what lay ahead, Akhter called his landlords and manufacturers, explained the situation and focussed on what mattered most — his people’s survival. The team divided the limited funds to ensure everyone could afford food and medicine for three months. But the founders took nothing home.

Those months of apparent inaction and deep introspection changed how the company operated. When operations resumed, Koskii went through two major shifts.

The first change was structural. The pandemic forced hard decisions, and many non-essential leadership roles had to go. However, the company retained most of the 300-strong workforce. What emerged was a leaner, more efficient team, deeply aligned with the company’s purpose.

More importantly, technology became the backbone of the business. To cope with stress during lockdowns, Akhter went back to the one skill he trusted most: writing code. He stayed up late, coding and developing software programs to make the business more efficient. He also created a series of algorithms that streamlined Koskii’s inventory and supply chain systems.

Akhter’s deep familiarity with the unorganised retail ecosystem had given him a rare advantage. He understood how suppliers worked, how orders moved and where inefficiencies hid.

What changed? Earlier, Koskii held its inventory for nearly six months. After the tech implementation, this dropped to three months, substantially increasing inventory turnover. According to the brand, this is a significant achievement in the ethnic wear segment, where most businesses hold stock for up to eight months.

The weekly allocation process, which used to take three days of manual work, became an automated daily task. The software now generates accurate distribution reports in minutes, accelerating replenishment cycles, reducing dead stock and improving efficiency across operations.

To fix this, Akhter’s team linked their software directly with supplier workflows. Purchase orders were automatically generated from real-time sales data, eliminating manual forecasting and speeding up replenishment.

Each day, the system analysed fast-selling styles, remaining stock across stores, and available quantities in the warehouse. If inventory existed in the warehouse, it was instantly allocated and routed to the right stores based on demand patterns. If stock was insufficient, the platform triggered a purchase requirement directly with the relevant supplier, who received the order through an integrated production interface.

This dual flow, first utilising warehouse inventory, then activating supplier production kept stock tight and responsive, reducing overall inventory holding to around 2.5 months and creating a negative working-capital cycle that gave Koskii the agility of a much larger brand.

As offline stores remained closed or operated under restrictions even after lockdowns ended, the brand took another decisive turn and entered online retail. It was a move Akhter had long envisioned but never prioritised. However, the pandemic and its aftermath made it essential.

Koskii had a website by 2019, but Akhter was honest about its limitations. The founders did not invest much in its features, and it functioned more as a digital catalogue than a sales channel. “We would upload maybe 50 photos because people needed to see our products,” he said. “However, performance marketing felt out of reach. We lacked the budget and the expertise to run it effectively.”

Digital commerce was small then, generating monthly revenue of INR 15-20 Lakh. It has grown gradually and now accounts for 30% of the brand’s revenue. That figure includes earnings from its own website and ecommerce marketplaces, although it did not opt for the marketplace model before 2022-23.

Essentially, Koskii’s starting prices were too high for those platforms, and its premium products continue to sell poorly. Even the company’s website underperforms.

Still, the website performs better than marketplaces because visitors arrive with intent. They come to Koskii stores to purchase from their favourite brand. “We can sell for INR 4-5K there,” said Akhter. “But overall order values are always lower on marketplaces, and product return rates are extremely high because those shoppers are more price-conscious,”

Despite these challenges, the company has built a sizable marketplace business. “We have learnt a lot about managing this channel. But there is still much to build and learn,” he added.

Since its rebranding in 2016, Koskii has swiftly carved out a place among fashion buyers in Bengaluru and Chennai. But when it came to expansion, the question was whether to deepen its hold across the South or pursue the national market. Akhter believed the product line provided the answer.

“The ghaghra, a North Indian staple, was selling well in the South. If Southern shoppers were embracing Northern silhouettes, why wouldn’t the North respond to a well-curated ethnic brand? If we can sell it in the South, why not try the North?” he chuckled.

The company opened its stores in Delhi and Hyderabad, but expansion proved more challenging than scaling up closer to home. Operating costs were high; brand awareness was low, and there wasn’t enough marketing capital to build visibility. Instead, the team relied on operational discipline and data to optimise the new stores. Product assortments were fine-tuned, inventories were tightened and performances were monitored week by week.

Although Delhi and Hyderabad were not immediately profitable, strong numbers from Bengaluru and Chennai helped absorb the drag from the new markets, and the overall business stayed in the black.

That stability set the stage for Koskii’s first external capital raise. In 2023, it secured INR 61 Cr in Series A funding from Baring Private Equity Partners India.

Before the funding, Akhter met with Rahul Bhasin, the fund’s managing partner and a retail sector veteran who had grown wary of the category. But after hearing the brand’s story, from bootstrapping to lean growth to a technology-driven turnaround, he decided to invest.

Most of the funding was used to set up new stores and hire a senior leadership team that had built INR 500-1K Cr businesses and expanded technology teams handling core operations.

However, marketing remained deliberately conservative.

Akhter believes national campaigns only make sense when distribution reaches critical mass. “If I have just six stores in Bengaluru and spend INR 25 Cr on marketing, it will have no impact,” he said. “The right approach is to build a strong store network first across multiple cities. Once you have 50 or 60 stores with an annual revenue potential of INR 400 Cr, large-scale marketing will pay off.”

Meanwhile, the company plans to grow its store count and is preparing for a bigger funding round, a move that could pave the way for an eventual public listing.

Akhter remains focussed on fundamentals, though, such as strong unit economics, strategic store locations and operational discipline but thinks Koskii is ready for the next leap. “We believe we have already built something strong, and it is time to scale fast. But we are still careful. When we opened each store, I was very clear about one thing. Our unit economics must be in place.”

The Koskii experience goes beyond building stores and scaling online. It is about redefining how Indian women connect with ethnic wear, blending tradition with a modern perspective.

For Akhter, Koskii’s omnichannel play lies at the core of its strategy. He sees online and offline retail not as competing channels but as complementary ones. “Lower price points sell faster online, but high-value products still move offline,” he said. That balance, however, is shifting.

He believes the future of ethnic wear retail will be built on that trust bridge between the digital and physical worlds. Brand familiarity, he said, would be the biggest driver of this evolution. As customer confidence rises, Akhter expects the company’s digital platforms to handle a growing share of premium ethnic wear business. “We have to be wherever our customers are,” he added.

For now, expansion remains focussed on India. The country’s $10.26 Bn women ethnic wear market offers sufficient headroom for growth. Even as established brands like Libas, Meena Bazaar and Soch scale rapidly, the organised sector will account for only a fraction of the total market. In fact, there is scope for six to 10 large brands to coexist profitably, said Akhter. For Koskii, global expansion will come after its operations stabilise and its systems and teams enter auto mode for seamless performance.

The bigger shift, Akhter said, would emerge from the unorganised segment. Many family-run businesses are now undergoing generational change. Their successors are bound to prefer structured operations and technology over the traditional wholesale and retail models built on frequent travels, manual co-ordination and fragmented supply chains. This could lead to several consolidations, with smaller businesses evolving into franchisees or partners of organised brands.

Such collaborations could reshape the landscape of ethnic wear. Combining the entrepreneurial spirit of small retailers with the scale, technology and market influence of organised brands could produce a more efficient, value-generating model for the entire ecosystem.