Piyush Suri’s first day at PricewaterhouseCoopers in New York ended at half past five in the evening, on a pavement in Manhattan, where he ran into the only person he knew in the entire city. His name was Ripun Jai Mehta. A year later the two of them started a company together.
Piyush Suri is the co-founder and chief executive of 5BY7, a New Delhi company that designs and produces custom branded merchandise for corporations and runs their online brand stores. In the year before this Founder Thesis conversation, 5BY7 closed at roughly ₹12 crore in revenue, up from ₹3 crore three years earlier, on a total of ₹70 lakh raised across two small angel rounds. Its largest client was Mercedes-Benz India.
Who is Piyush Suri, the founder of 5BY7?
He grew up in Chandigarh, the son of an accountant father and a mother who was both a painter and an architect. She filled his childhood with skating, taekwondo, basketball and, one summer, knitting. Boys in Chandigarh did not knit in the nineties. His mother did not much care.
He went to Punjab Engineering College to study production engineering and spent almost no time there. What he did instead was AIESEC, the student exchange organisation founded in 1948 and present in more than a hundred countries. He joined in his first year selling internship programmes to Chandigarh companies, became a vice president twice, and in his fourth year stood for election and won the presidency of the Chandigarh chapter.
By his own account he barely met the attendance requirement for his degree. He did well in the exams. The education happened elsewhere.
Why did he leave Accenture and PwC to start a company in 2008?
Piyush Suri graduated in 2006 and joined Accenture in a technical role. The frustration was immediate and specific. He could see that performing better would not move him faster, because promotion ran on a queue.
“So this whole concept of being in the line for growth doesn’t really work for me personally.”
He assumed this was an Indian problem. It wasn’t. Through an AIESEC placement programme he moved to New York for a year at PwC, working on data warehousing and business intelligence, and found the same machine running there. At the end of the year PwC offered him a permanent role in London. He turned it down and flew home.
He returned to India in 2008, when starting up was not yet fashionable. Flipkart was barely alive. Myntra was still selling customised products. There was almost no angel money. Nobody he told thought it was a good idea.
What was Vitamin Print, and why did it fail?
The first company was Vitamin Print, an online printing business modelled on VistaPrint, which was then at its peak in the United States. The seed capital was Piyush Suri’s US tax refund, returned to him because he was not a citizen, plus money from Ripun Jai Mehta, who had run businesses before and whose family was already in printing. Rahul Kumar, a college friend from AIESEC, joined as the first employee on sales.
Customer acquisition was a Google Business listing and some directory entries. It worked, in the sense that it brought a trickle. It did not work in the sense that mattered. Indians in 2008 would not buy printing they could not touch. Buyers wanted to know what the paper felt like before they ordered a thousand business cards.
The company survived by taking anything: ₹2,000 business card orders, logo design, whatever came through the personal network. Piyush Suri is blunt about the assumption underneath the failure, which he says he shared with most founders of that era. They believed a website was a shop, and that people would simply arrive at it.
How did the Opera Software contract turn a printing startup into 5BY7?
About two years in, hand to mouth, a client changed the company. Opera Software, the Norwegian maker of the Opera browser, asked whether the team also did merchandise. They needed t-shirts, bags and giveaways for their campus ambassador programme, produced in India and shipped globally.
That question reframed the whole business. Printing was a commodity where buyers argued about price and delivery dates and would not pay for creativity. Merchandise had a genuine gap, because what most companies handed out was bad.
“You think of wooden keychains, low quality pens, you think of t-shirts that you probably will wear once on that sports day of your company.”
They signed a two-year contract with Opera. Revenue at the time was under ₹50 lakh a year, enough to pay the office and small salaries, and they felt they were on top of the world. The business was renamed 5BY7 and stopped chasing consumers. It built a catalogue, went B2B, and started selling ideas rather than print runs.
There was a detour in between. Around 2010, Piyush Suri and Ripun Jai Mehta started ArtNouv, a service that turned a customer’s photograph into a hand-painted portrait. Running two companies got heavy, someone offered a decent price, and they sold it within months.
How does 5BY7 make money, and what is a brand extension?
By 2020, 5BY7 ran three lines. Selling merchandise online to retail buyers. One-off bespoke orders. And long-term contracts. Events drove about half the business.
Piyush Suri is careful about a distinction most people in the trade miss. A one-off order and a catalogue order look like the same business and are not. One needs a development and pitching skill to close. The other needs speed of delivery against a fixed catalogue. Different sales motion, different operations. Confusing them cost 5BY7 its first few years.
The third line is the one that turned into the company’s real identity. The online catalogue never sold much directly, but it generated remarkable leads. Large companies would look at 5BY7’s product site and ask the team to build and run theirs. That became brand extension as a service: strategy, product design, the store, the warehousing, the whole operation.
At the time of the interview 5BY7 ran five such engagements. The biggest was Mercedes-Benz India, live for over three years, structured as a marketplace where individual dealerships sell branded merchandise to their own customers. Audi’s brand extension came on the year before. Volvo iSure and Schneider Electric were also on the roster, and a global mandate had just been signed, one that required registering a US entity with warehousing.
How much has 5BY7 raised, and what is its revenue?
Very little, on both counts, by startup standards. Two angel tranches, one in 2012 and one in 2016, totalling about ₹70 lakh across a decade. The 2016 attempt at a larger round collapsed when committed angels backed out, leaving one investor still willing to write a cheque. That was the moment Piyush Suri stopped raising and decided to grow on internal cash.
“Growth only comes from more focus. It doesn’t come from doing more.”
He had learned it by doing too much. During the ₹3 crore years the company was also exporting to France through a partnership, running B2C, running design services. Cutting back to what generated margin is what produced the four-fold move.
Tracxn puts 5BY7’s annual revenue at $606K as of 31 March 2023. The company still trades from New Delhi. Its 2015 pitch to the press was a catalogue of close to 5,000 products and more than 500 corporate clients, and the goal it set itself on the podcast was one of a stack of deliberately oversized targets.
“No matter what, set audacious goals. When you have audacious goals, you are going to meet them.”
What is Piyush Suri doing now, and what is NOOE?
The ₹100 crore did not come from corporate gifting. Piyush Suri’s second act came out of the same pandemic that was slowing 5BY7 down when this conversation was recorded.
In 2021 he co-founded NOOE with Neetica Pande, an industrial designer who had spent five years in Copenhagen working with studios including Normann Copenhagen and Aspekt Office. He had found her on Behance while looking for a product designer for a CRED project. NOOE makes premium desk sets, stationery, bags and workspace objects in walnut, black oak and aluminium, sold direct in India and abroad. It won a Red Dot Design Award in 2022 for its Config01 desk set, ships to more than 31 countries from warehouses in New Jersey, Venlo and Delhi, and by late 2025 was drawing 20 to 25% of revenue from the US, UK, EU and Middle East.
In January 2025 the two of them walked onto Shark Tank India’s fourth season asking ₹50 lakh for 1%. They left with ₹5 crore from Peyush Bansal for a 51% controlling stake, reported as the largest single investment in the show’s history.
Which makes the last thing Piyush Suri said in this interview worth reading twice. Asked about his personal goals, he talked about consistent creative output, about competing with his own previous work, and about having let go of the ambition that drove him in his twenties. It is fine, he said, if he never becomes a billionaire. What he wanted was for the work to be respected.
Five years later, the man who had been chasing scale in corporate merchandise had uilt a design brand instead, and handed control of it to a shark on national television.
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Further reading on Founder Thesis: Arush Chopra on building a profitable bootstrapped D2C at Just Herbs, Lokesh Daga on bootstrapping Nasher Miles past ₹100 crore, and Arjun Vaidya’s ₹144 crore exit and what came after it.