Ask a founder for the one hack and you will get a soundbite. Ask him how he actually runs the place and you get the business.
Both things happened in the same ten-minute conversation. On Nikhil Kamath's WTF podcast, Manish Poddar — who built Rare Rabbit with his wife Akshika into the largest brand in Bengaluru-based House of Rare — was asked what a young person starting a clothing brand should do. His answer was khadi. That is the clip that travelled. It is also the least actionable thing he said.
The useful part came later, almost in passing, and it is close to heresy in Indian apparel retail: Rare Rabbit does not let its retailers order.
The fabric answer, and where the story drifts
Poddar's case for khadi is a case for structural differentiation rather than cosmetic differentiation. His framing is that every other fabric in the world is global — you can source it, so can your competitor, and so the fabric can never be the thing that makes you distinct. Khadi, he argues, is the one exception, because it exists only here.
That is closer to literally true than it sounds. Khadi is not a style or a texture; it is a legal category. Under the KVIC Act it means cloth woven on a handloom in India from cotton, silk or wool yarn that was hand-spun in India. The Khadi Mark Regulations of 2013 went further and made the tag compulsory — a product cannot be sold as khadi in India without it. There is a statutory body, a registered mark, and an enforcement regime. Whatever else that is, it is a moat no competitor can buy their way across.
His description of the cloth itself is accurate and worth repeating because most people who invoke khadi have never handled the real thing: raw cotton with the seeds not fully ginned out, hand-spun on a charkha into deliberately uneven yarn, hand-woven, vegetable-dyed. It is rough in the hand at first and softens with wear. He points at Raw Mango as the house doing this properly at a premium, and he is right that the demand-side conditions are unusually good — swadeshi as a consumer preference is having a genuine commercial moment, and the weaving villages need the orders.
Then he tells the denim story, and this is where a good anecdote outruns the history. His version: denim is French, the blue was added by Americans, and they took the indigo from Tamil Nadu.
The first part is right. Denim is a contraction of serge de Nîmes, the twill first woven in Nîmes; the sibling word, jeans, comes from Genoa via Genoa fustian. But the blue was not an American addition. The weavers of Nîmes were already dyeing the warp threads with indigo and leaving the weft undyed — that warp-only dyeing is the entire reason denim fades the way it does, and it predates Levi Strauss by a long way. What the popular telling garbles into "the Americans took the blue from India" is a real and much larger fact underneath: Indigofera was for centuries overwhelmingly an Indian crop, and the indigo trade was one of the more brutal chapters of colonial agriculture in Bengal.
His conclusion — that an Indian brand has a genuine claim on indigo and organic cotton that a European or American one does not — survives the correction. The specific etymology does not. If you are going to build a brand on heritage, the heritage has to hold up when a customer checks it, and that one does not quite.
What he actually sells
The more revealing answer came when Kamath pushed on margin. Poddar's response was that fashion design is not cutting and pasting pieces, it is building a complete look, and that the way you get paid for it is storytelling. Then the line that is the actual thesis: story is IP.
The detail he gives to prove it is the strangest and most convincing thing in the interview. Every House of Rare store runs the same fragrance. So does the office. The reason is not ambience — it is odour control. A garment passes through a large number of pairs of hands before it reaches a customer, and it arrives carrying the smell of the people who made and handled it, which varies with diet. Neutralise it at the store and the garment stops smelling of anyone. The proof that it works is a complaint the company gets on omni-channel orders shipped from a store: customers occasionally report that they were sent used clothes, because the garment smells of something rather than nothing.
That is not brand-building in the sense the phrase usually gets used. It is a manufacturing-defect fix that happens to double as a signature. It also tells you what "story is IP" means in practice at this company: not a campaign, a set of physical decisions a competitor would have to notice before they could copy.
The same instinct shows up in the small rigidities he refuses to trade away — the brand name sitting on the belly of the blazer because that is where an Italian house would put it, one typeface across the website, the decks and the letters, a single playlist pushed to every store from head office. Asked for a better word than rigidity, he offers: stick to your core.
The part that is genuinely hard to copy
Here is the heresy. India's apparel wholesale model runs on road shows. You show the season's collection to your trade partners, they place orders for their market, and you manufacture against those orders. It is how risk gets shared, and it is close to universal.
Rare Rabbit does not do it. Poddar says they are the only brand in the country that does not show collections and does not take bookings from the roughly 700 points of sale they supply. Instead the company decides what each market gets and ships it, on its own read of the data.
The justification is a sentence most founders would not say out loud: the customer does not know what he truly wants — in India, for certain. Paired with it is the observation that India is the hungriest market he knows for new, and that this hunger is not the same thing as knowing what the new thing should be.
Whether or not you accept the premise, notice what the policy actually does. It moves inventory risk off the retailer and onto the brand, permanently. That is the opposite of what the wholesale model is designed to do, and it is only survivable if your read on demand is better than the aggregate read of 700 shopkeepers who each know their own street. It is a bet on the brand's judgement being right at a rate high enough to pay for being wrong at scale.
The cycle time is the other half of it. Indian fashion has traditionally bought twice a year — spring/summer and autumn/winter. Poddar's benchmark is Zara, which innovates daily, and his claim is that his own design office does too. He puts the shelf life of a given shirt design at about two and a half to three months before it has to change. Nothing about a two-season buying calendar can service a ten-week design cycle, which is precisely why the road shows had to go.
Marking the playbook to market
The interview went out in March 2024. There is enough on the record since to check it.
FY24 — the year being described — was the company's breakout. Operating revenue rose roughly 69% to about ₹637 crore from ₹376 crore, and profit at parent Radhamani Textiles more than doubled to around ₹75 crore from ₹32 crore. On the numbers, the playbook was working exactly as advertised.
One detail worth pausing on: the roughly 700 points of sale Poddar cited in the interview is still what the company reports today, while exclusive stores have gone from the 120-to-160 range he mentioned to more than 180. The distribution footprint deepened rather than widened — more of its own stores, the same wholesale base. For a business that took control of what its retailers receive, that is the consistent move.
FY25 is where it gets more interesting, and where the available reporting needs a caveat. Figures circulating for that year put revenue around ₹819 crore — growth of roughly 35%, still strong but well down from 69% — with profit falling sharply on a near-doubling of employee costs and higher advertising spend. Those specific numbers trace to secondary summaries rather than a filing we could examine, and the corporate databases will currently only confirm that Radhamani Textiles sat somewhere between ₹500 crore and ₹1,000 crore for the year. Treat the shape as indicative and the decimals as unconfirmed.
The shape, though, is the honest sequel to the interview. A brand that carries its own inventory risk, refuses wholesale bookings, redesigns every ten weeks and controls the fragrance in 180 stores is running a structurally expensive operation. Growth of that kind is bought with people and marketing, and both lines appear to have moved hard. That is not a failure of the playbook. It is the playbook's bill arriving.
What a twenty-year-old should take from this
Not khadi. Poddar's own advice to a young founder was to find a difference, and khadi was one worked example of the principle, not the principle itself. He also said, plainly, that he would like to build the khadi brand himself before he retires — which is a reasonable thing for a man with 180 stores to say and an unreasonable place for someone with none to start.
The transferable parts are cheaper and less romantic. Pick a difference that is structural rather than decorative, so it cannot be bought off a shelf by whoever copies you next season. Understand that the story is the margin, and that it is made of physical decisions rather than adjectives. Decide who carries the inventory risk deliberately, because that single choice determines how fast you can move. And be prepared for the operating cost of the thing you just designed, because a business built to be difficult to copy is also difficult to run.
This article is based on Manish Poddar's remarks on the WTF podcast with Nikhil Kamath (clip, March 2024). Financial figures are from published reporting on Radhamani Textiles' filings; FY25 figures are indicative and not yet corroborated against a primary filing, as noted above.
