The Souled Store
Founders
Vedang Patel, Aditya Sharma, Rohin Samtaney, Harsh Lal · Founded 2013 · HQ today: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
The Souled Store was founded by Vedang Patel, Aditya Sharma, Rohin Samtaney, Harsh Lal in 2013. It is now led by Vedang Patel.
In 2013 the four co-founders noticed that Indian fans of Marvel, DC and other franchises had few places to buy official merchandise; most options were street bootlegs or expensive imports. They pooled personal savings, reportedly about $6,380 (₹5.5 lakh), and chose to pay for official licences instead of selling look-alike designs. That decision became the company's identity.
Indian entrepreneur and engineer.
Vedang Patel co-founded The Souled Store in 2013. Deeply frustrated by the absolute lack of affordable, official pop-culture merchandise in India, he and his co-founders pooled incredibly minimal personal savings to start printing quirky t-shirts out of a small apartment in Mumbai. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Indian entrepreneur.
Aditya Sharma co-founded The Souled Store in 2013. He played an absolutely critical role in securing the highly complex, multi-layered official licensing agreements with massive global conglomerates (like Disney and Warner Bros) that legitimized the brand. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Indian entrepreneur.
Rohin Samtaney co-founded The Souled Store in 2013. He served as the primary operational architect, managing the highly complex, massively scaling supply chain required to deliver millions of custom-printed garments across India reliably. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Indian entrepreneur.
Harsh Lal co-founded The Souled Store in 2013. He heavily drove the company's incredibly successful, highly viral social media marketing strategies, perfectly targeting the Gen Z demographic with deeply localized pop-culture references. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).
Vedang Patel
Co-Founder & CEO
Co-founded The Souled Store in 2013 and leads the company with his three co-founders.
The Souled Store was co-founded by four close friends from Mumbai: Vedang Patel, Aditya Sharma, Rohin Samtaney, and Harsh Lal.
The founders met during their college and school years in Mumbai, bonding over a shared passion for comic books, superhero films, gaming, rock music, and cricket.
The founders were fresh college graduates exploring traditional corporate roles in engineering, consulting, and finance before realizing they wanted to build a creative venture around their personal fandom passions.
The name originated from their belief that everyone should do what their soul truly loves. They wanted to create a brand for people who follow their passions—whether comic books, cinema, or art—putting their "soul" into the store.
In their first year, the founders operated out of a tiny, sweltering room in Mumbai, personally folding t-shirts, attaching swing tags, answering customer support phone calls, and carrying cardboard packages to local post offices.
With no corporate track record, the young founders cold-emailed studio licensing heads, presented professional design concepts tailored to Indian youth, and guaranteed strict anti-counterfeiting compliance, winning test licenses that they turned into massive successes.
Harsh Lal spearheaded business partnerships, licensing acquisitions, and later led the company's offline retail strategy, negotiating flagship store placements in India's premier shopping malls.
Aditya Sharma architected the company's early e-commerce website and mobile applications, ensuring ultra-fast page speeds, seamless mobile checkout, and proprietary inventory tracking.
Rohin Samtaney established relationships with premier textile mills and printing facilities in Tirupur and Mumbai, creating a dependable, high-quality manufacturing backbone that eliminated product defects.
By reinvesting every rupee of operational profit back into inventory and licenses for their first five years, the founders scaled the business to over ₹50 crore in revenue before taking any outside venture capital.
The founders emphasize falling in love with the problem rather than the fundraising pitch, maintaining relentless focus on product quality, treating early customers like family, and prioritizing positive unit economics from day one.
Their journey proved that four young friends without family business backgrounds or elite corporate connections could build a beloved, profitable, multi-hundred-crore consumer brand purely through grit, friendship, and authentic passion.
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