Bewakoof: a slogan t-shirt site that became an Aditya Birla brand
Bewakoof is a Mumbai based direct-to-consumer fashion brand founded in 2012 by Prabhkiran Singh and Siddharth Munot, batchmates from IIT Bombay. The site went live on 1 April 2012, a date Singh said was chosen to match the brand name, the Hindi word for fool. It sold slogan t-shirts to Indian college students at a time when, as Singh later put it, shoppers aspired to foreign labels and a home-grown internet brand was a hard sell to investors.
Fourteen years on, Bewakoof is majority owned by Aditya Birla Digital Fashion Ventures, part of TMRW, the digital brands venture of Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail. Operating revenue reached Rs 243 crore in the year to March 2026, up 40.5 percent, with a loss of Rs 87.4 crore.
Building the brand without venture money
Bewakoof was Singh's third attempt at a business. He started Khadke Glassi, a fresh lassi venture, in 2010 and shut it after three years because demand in monsoon-heavy Mumbai was seasonal. A short lived B2B merchandise business followed and became the base idea for a clothing brand.
- Content before commerce: the founders ran an online Bewakoof magazine before the shop opened and built the audience on social media, with the Facebook page reaching 75,000 followers in about a month.
- A four-person team: the launch was run by two founders and two interns.
- Bank debt, not equity: unable to raise from investors who called them an internet brand, the founders mortgaged family property and borrowed from SBI and PNB. Angel money from Snapdeal cofounders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal and from investor Nikhil Vora arrived in 2015.
The financial record
Bewakoof was profitable for three years in the late 2010s, on a small scale: a Rs 30 lakh profit on Rs 38 crore of revenue in the year to March 2017, Rs 2 crore in FY2018 and Rs 29 lakh in FY2019. Revenue then jumped to Rs 209 crore in FY2020, but heavy advertising of Rs 41 crore and a round of senior hires turned the year into a Rs 28 crore loss. The pandemic hit harder: sales were close to zero from April to July 2020 and the topline fell to Rs 128 crore in FY2021.
Recovery has been slow. Operating revenue was Rs 160 crore in FY2022, Rs 161 crore in FY2024 and Rs 173 crore in FY2025, so it took until FY2026 for the company to pass its pre-pandemic level. Losses have run alongside: Rs 80 crore in FY2022, Rs 103 crore in FY2024, Rs 73.2 crore in FY2025 after staff costs were cut 39.5 percent, and Rs 87.4 crore in FY2026 as marketing rose 26.5 percent to Rs 62 crore and depreciation nearly tripled to Rs 16.6 crore. Unit economics are still negative, though improving: the company spent Rs 1.38 to earn each rupee of operating revenue in FY2026, against Rs 1.43 a year earlier.
How the business works
Bewakoof designs its own apparel and accessories and sells them under its own brand. Products are almost the whole business: in the year to March 2022, goods were 94.3 percent of operating revenue, with TriBe loyalty subscriptions and advertising commissions from other brands contributing Rs 9.21 crore between them. Buying the goods it sells is the largest cost line, Rs 134 crore out of Rs 336 crore of total expenses in FY2026.
Returns are the category's structural cost. Bewakoof booked Rs 67 crore of returns against Rs 264 crore of gross sales in FY2025, a rate of about 25 percent, down from roughly 30 percent the year before.
Widening the catalogue
The brand has repeatedly added categories rather than changing its positioning. Bottomwear, footwear, activewear and innerwear followed the t-shirts and phone covers. In July 2021 it launched Cosmos, a beauty and personal care line of 43 products from day and night creams to aftershave, bath salts and serums. In December 2021 it added Bazaar, a marketplace section letting other brands sell on the platform. The Aditya Birla Group now lists licensed merchandise, graphic tees, oversized fits and bottomwear as the brand's core ranges.
Marketing moved from pure content to film and celebrity campaigns: Sidharth Malhotra and Fatima Sana Shaikh fronted the 'Never Change' campaign, after earlier work with Rajkummar Rao and Sanya Malhotra, and advertising spend rose 2.36 times to Rs 33.6 crore in FY2022. In July 2021 the brand also partnered Excel Entertainment on merchandise for the Farhan Akhtar film Toofaan.
The Aditya Birla deal
Bewakoof raised Rs 80 crore from Bahrain based Investcorp in October 2019, a US$11.2 million round that gave the firm a 14 percent stake and a board seat, then Rs 8 crore in a 2020 bridge round, Rs 30 crore from IvyCap Ventures in March 2021 and Rs 60 crore from Investcorp, IvyCap and Spring Marketing Capital in August 2021. Total funding came to more than Rs 270 crore.
In November 2022, TMRW said it would invest Rs 200 crore for a majority stake reported at 73 to 80 percent, structured as a secondary purchase that gave every existing investor an exit. The deal completed in February 2023 through Aditya Birla Digital Fashion Ventures, whose holding stood at 86 percent as of the FY2025 filings, with Singh on 12.5 percent. Under group ownership Bewakoof moved beyond its own site and app onto marketplaces and into physical retail, running more than 30 exclusive brand stores by February 2026 with 40 targeted by that March.
Leadership change
On 24 February 2026, Singh said he would leave at the end of March after 14 years, citing health, family and personal priorities. TMRW chief executive Prashanth Aluru said the focus since the acquisition had been on the supply chain, omnichannel reach and operating discipline, and that TMRW would lead the brand's next phase. No replacement brand chief executive has been announced. FY2026, the year Singh left, was also the year revenue grew fastest since the acquisition.
What to watch
Bewakoof's stated ambitions have run well ahead of its results: it talked of Rs 1,000 crore of revenue within two years when launching Cosmos in 2021, and of Rs 1,500 crore over five years around the time of the TMRW deal. At Rs 243 crore in FY2026, the open questions are whether store expansion lifts the topline without re-inflating marketing spend, whether the return rate keeps falling, and who ends up running the brand day to day.
