Dhruv Toshniwal is the co-founder and CEO of The Pant Project, the Mumbai-based direct-to-consumer brand that sells nothing but men’s bottom wear - custom-tailored and ready-to-wear trousers, jeans, and chinos. He started it at 29 with his brother Udit, on ₹1 crore of revenue in its first year. Today the business runs at a ₹120 crore annualised pace, backed by a $4.25 million Series A from Sorin Investments, and is targeting ₹150–160 crore for the year ahead.
The detail most coverage misses is how close it came to never launching offline at all.
The Pant Project is built on a bet most apparel founders reject on instinct: sell one category, and sell it deeper than anyone else. While rivals stack shirts and accessories onto their catalogues to raise basket size, Toshniwal has kept his company to trousers, jeans, and chinos - split between custom-tailored and ready-to-wear lines, the latter now driving most of the business.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
From ₹1 crore in FY21, revenue grew to ₹31 crore by FY24 - the year of its first institutional round - then ₹40.7 crore in FY25. Toshniwal puts it plainly: “FY26, we’d probably close at like 80 crores in net sales. Monthly, we’re doing like 10 crores a month” - a run rate closer to ₹120 crore annualised.
The origin story runs through a store that never opened. In early 2020, Toshniwal signed a lease for a physical outlet in Mumbai’s Kala Ghoda arts district. Then the pandemic hit.
We signed a physical retail store in Kala Ghoda, which was to open in April, and COVID hit in March. So we never started offline.
With no store to open, The Pant Project became an online-only, custom-to-order business by necessity. It went badly at first: “Seventy-five percent used to fit well, twenty-five used to need an alteration, and it was expensive to get them back and send it back.” That forced the company to build a sizing database instead - cross-referencing measurements from more than 100,000 Indian men to push first-time fit accuracy from 70% to 93%. That dataset became the foundation for the ready-to-wear line launched in 2023, which now accounts for 85% of sales.
Toshniwal’s path here ran through two employers and a failed attempt at this inside his own family’s company. He studied economics at Wharton, graduating at 22, then spent four years at Oliver Wyman advising financial institutions. In 2017, he joined Banswara Syntex, his family’s 50-year-old, listed textile manufacturer doing roughly $150 million in revenue. There, he and Udit tried twice to build a consumer brand -an Everlane-style sustainable label, and a mid-premium bridal-wear line - before concluding the family’s manufacturing DNA couldn’t absorb the risk of either.
A manufacturer has to have a certain org structure focused around cost optimization. A brand has to have the courage to spend ad dollars on Meta with the belief that it will build brand equity that converts to P&L in the long term.
That’s why The Pant Project exists as a separate company, rather than a division of Banswara - even though Banswara remained its first supplier.
The Pant Project stayed bootstrapped for four years before raising a rupee. Its first institutional round came in June 2024: $4.25 million in Series A funding led by Sorin Investments, founded by former KKR India CEO Sanjay Nayar, with MGA Ventures, Huddle, Dexter Ventures, and angels Arjun Vaidya and Avni Biyani also in. The capital went almost entirely toward offline expansion: two pilot stores at the raise have since become 15 company-owned outlets across seven cities, with a roadmap toward 100.
That round also marked an inflection in the product mix. At ₹31 crore in FY24, the business was 90% custom-tailored - a model with a hard ceiling, since every pant needed an individual tailor. Today, at the ₹120 crore run rate, the ratio has flipped to 85% ready-to-wear, and gross margins have climbed from roughly 54–55% to over 60% as bulk fabric procurement replaced the waste of bespoke tailoring. Marketing efficiency followed the same curve - from ₹1 of sales per ₹1 spent to roughly ₹4 today, helped by an in-house content team and by the stores themselves, which Toshniwal says lift digital conversion in the cities they open in.
The edge, in Toshniwal’s framing, is backend engineering rather than front-end marketing. Ink Lock, a sulfur-dye denim treatment built after customers complained their dark jeans faded too fast for office wear, has taken denim from zero to 20–25% of revenue in 18 months. A second line, Malai power-stretch knit trousers, uses a silicone waistband grip borrowed from lingerie manufacturing. None of it runs through Banswara alone anymore: the company now sources from 12–15 partners across Mumbai, Surat, Tirupur, Coimbatore, Bengaluru, Ludhiana, and Delhi NCR - wide enough to satisfy investors it wasn’t dependent on family ties for its product.
The market he’s chasing is worth ₹1.64 lakh crore in menswear overall, with bottom wear alone estimated at ₹40,000–50,000 crore, growing 10–12% a year. His bet: specialising in one category builds a stickier business than stacking on shirts - top wear, he notes, is twice the size but “200x more competitive.”
The comparison set backs him up. Snitch has scaled fast on 20-day trend cycles to a ₹900 crore run rate, but carries an 18.5% return rate. Rare Rabbit built real profitability - ₹74.5 crore PAT on ₹637 crore FY24 revenue - before profits fell 60% to ₹16 crore in FY25 as retail expansion ate into margins. Wrogn, backed by Virat Kohli’s name, went the other way: revenue down 9%, losses widening to ₹75 crore. The same category-discipline logic shows up at Nasher Miles and USTRAA; the clearest precedent is Go Fashion, the listed women’s bottom-wear specialist with over 500 stores - the model The Pant Project is applying to men, with a backend not unlike Fynd.
With 15 stores already EBITDA-positive at the store level and a target of 100 within three years, Toshniwal’s next test is whether the single-category discipline that worked at ₹120 crore holds at the scale he’s chasing.
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Sources
Business Standard: The Pant Project raises $4.25 mn in Series A round led by Sorin Investments — https://www.business-standard.com/companies/start-ups/the-pant-project-raises-425-mn-in-seriesa-round-led-by-sorin-investments-124061800917_1.html
Economic Times Retail: The Pant Project scales 40x in 4 years, eyes ₹160 cr by FY27, EBITDA breakeven ahead — https://retail.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/apparel-fashion/the-pant-project-scales-40x-in-4-years-eyes-rs-160-cr-by-fy27-ebitda-breakeven-ahead/129768861
VCCircle: The Pant Project, five others raise early-stage funding — https://www.vccircle.com/thepant-project-five-others-raise-early-stage-funding
Entrackr: D2C fashion brand The Pant Project raises $4.25 Mn in Series A — https://entrackr.com/2024/06/d2c-fashion-brand-the-pant-project-raises-4-25-mn-in-series-a
Entrepreneur India: D2C Fashion Brand The Pant Project Raises USD 4.25 Mn in Series-A Led by Sorin Investments — https://india.entrepreneur.com/news-and-trends/d2c-fashion-brand-the-pant-project-raises-usd-425-mn-in/475812
Tracxn: The Pant Project — Company Profile & Team — https://tracxn.com/d/companies/the-pant-project/__CljOi5yF0ecWPSwXB49-oFQUnsTQRnkQDd93Tu3GMxs
Inc42: The Pant Project — Total Funding, Rounds & Investors — https://inc42.com/company/the-pant-project/funding/
Apparel Resources: Life in Focus — Dhruv Toshniwal, Co-founder of The Pant Project — https://apparelresources.com/business-news/retail/tete-tete-dhruv-toshniwal-co-founder-pant-project/