The Tech-Mind Behind the Fit: Pankaj Vermani’s Playbook for Building Clovia
Meet Pankaj Vermani, the IIT-Delhi grad & 3x founder who built the tech engine behind Clovia's ₹950 crore acquisition. His playbook for D2C success.
Behind Clovia, the D2C brand that transformed India’s lingerie market, is a powerful tech engine. This engine, built on data, proprietary algorithms, and a contrarian “Make in India” bet, propelled the company to a ₹950 crore (approx. $125 million) acquisition by Reliance Retail. The architect of that engine is Pankaj Vermani, a serial entrepreneur and IIT-Delhi graduate who combined his grassroots understanding of retail with high-level engineering to solve a problem that was, in his words, a “bursting headache” for millions of women.
This is the story of Pankaj Vermani’s journey and the core philosophies that built Clovia. His deep insights were shared in a candid conversation on the Founder Thesis Podcast. To hear his full playbook, be sure to watch the complete episode.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The "Aspirin" Thesis: A Lesson Forged in Experience 💡
Before Clovia, Pankaj co-founded Vriti, an ed-tech startup. While the platform grew to 1.5 million students, he learned a hard lesson: user numbers are a vanity metric if consumption is low. This experience became the crucible for his core business philosophy.
"The customer's head has to be bursting for my product rather than selling them a product that will help them have a good muscular body."
This "aspirin vs. vitamins" framework—solving an urgent, painful need rather than offering a good-to-have solution—became the foundational principle for Clovia. He resolved that his next venture would not just be innovative; it would be indispensable to its customers.
From Lingerie Shop Floors to IIT-Delhi
Pankaj’s journey is a fascinating blend of street-level commerce and elite technical education. His family was in the lingerie trade, and as a young student, he was required to spend two hours daily at his father's store in Meerut. There, he witnessed firsthand the awkwardness and inefficiency of the traditional lingerie buying process.
While this experience gave him an unfiltered, grassroots understanding of the market, his path led not to the family business but to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-D), where he earned an integrated B.Tech/M.Tech in Computers & Mathematics. This unique combination of on-the-ground market insight and deep technological expertise created the perfect perspective from which to revolutionize the industry.
The Serial Entrepreneur’s Playbook
Pankaj is a 3x founder with a history of building and exiting companies. His first venture, Seeknet Technologies, a real-time search engine, was acquired by the ad-tech major Tribal Fusion. He then stayed on to incubate their India office, learning the intricacies of scaling a global tech operation.
This journey taught him invaluable lessons about market timing, the importance of supportive infrastructure like digital payments, and the discipline required to build a sustainable business.
Building the Clovia Engine ⚙️
When Pankaj and his co-founders started Clovia, they didn't just aim to create a new brand; they aimed to re-engineer the entire value chain.
"We went back to doing the harder way of defining the supply chain ourselves. I think that became the core of our business."
Here’s how he built Clovia’s formidable operational and tech engine:
The Contrarian Supply Chain Bet: At a time when many fashion brands relied on imports from China, Pankaj championed a “Make in India” approach. Clovia partnered with and empowered local production experts to set up agile factories. This “harder way” gave them unprecedented control over quality, dramatically shorter lead times, and far greater capital efficiency—critical for navigating India's diverse market.
"Monk": The AI Brain of Clovia: Pankaj built the company’s proprietary tech stack from the ground up to eliminate guesswork. The crown jewel is "Monk," an AI-powered planning engine. He explains:
"We built something which is called the Monk... That's the Sensei with the sixth sense to predict the future... In fact, when the brand crossed two hundred crores is when we hired our first planner." This system automates inventory decisions, predicts demand for thousands of SKUs, and optimizes size ratios for different styles and regions, minimizing waste and maximizing sales.”
Data as the Denominator: For Pankaj, technology was the key to unlocking efficiency at every step. From using pin-code level data to determine the perfect product assortment for a specific offline store to creating a feedback system that connects customer reviews directly to the design team, data was the common thread tying the entire operation together.
By The Numbers: Clovia's Tech-Fueled Success 📈
Pankaj Vermani’s tech-first strategies translated into staggering real-world results:
The Acquisition: Acquired by Reliance Retail for ₹950 crore ($125 million).
Funding: Successfully raised over $25 million across multiple rounds from investors like IvyCap Ventures and Mountain Partners.
Operational Scale: Serves over 5 million women and grew to a scale of selling one piece of lingerie every two seconds.
Hyper-Growth: The company doubled its revenue year-on-year, reaching ₹291.7 crore in FY23.
Inventory Efficiency: Clovia’s predictive models are so effective that over 80% of their inventory is 45 days old or less—a remarkable feat in the fashion industry.
Award-Winning: Under his leadership, Clovia’s previous venture Vriti won the Deloitte Fast 50 for two consecutive years (2010/2011) and the Red Herring 100 Asia award.
Pankaj Vermani's Core Philosophies for Founders
Throughout his journey, Pankaj has developed a set of core principles for building a sustainable business:
"One thing was we always said we going to be solution focused right first question we keep asking is what is this solving."
Focus on Margins, Not Just Revenue: "Revenue is vanity... margins as the real metric to track."
Prioritize Customer Retention: "Retention is business, everything else is marketing."
Embrace 'Boring' Business Fundamentals: "Business is rhetorical and rhetorical is boring, but boring makes money!"
The Road Ahead
Post-acquisition, Pankaj continues at the helm of Clovia, leveraging the immense scale and retail expertise of Reliance to push the brand to new heights. His journey is a powerful testament to the idea that the most profound revolutions often happen by applying rigorous, scientific principles to industries long overlooked by technology. He didn't just build a brand; he built a resilient, data-driven engine that has fundamentally changed the game.
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