On 5 August 2026, Reliance Brands Limited announced an exclusive partnership to bring SKIMS — the shapewear and loungewear label co-founded by Kim Kardashian and Jens Grede — into India, with the first stores opening in Delhi and Mumbai and a wider rollout to follow. The press release framed it the way every RBL launch announcement is framed: a natural next step for a fast-growing global brand, entering a market with rising demand for premium labels.
That framing is true of literally every brand RBL has ever brought into India, including the ones that quietly left. The press release for Clarks' 2022 tie-up with Reliance Retail read almost identically to SKIMS'. Clarks shut all 32 of its India stores and walked away from the joint venture two years later. If a launch-day announcement can't tell you which outcome you're getting, the operator's actual track record can — and Reliance Brands has been running this playbook long enough now to have one worth reading.
The scale of the bet
Reliance Brands Limited, a subsidiary of Reliance Retail Ventures, was set up in 2007 specifically to "launch, scale and nurture global fashion and lifestyle brands in India." Nearly two decades later its roster runs to more than 30 names spanning the full price ladder — Armani Exchange and Emporio Armani, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Coach, Diesel, Hugo Boss, Jimmy Choo, Kate Spade, Michael Kors, Paul Smith, Salvatore Ferragamo, Steve Madden, Tiffany & Co., Tod's, Tory Burch, Valentino, Versace and Zegna among them. SKIMS joins a portfolio, not a startup.
That scale is precisely why the outcomes are worth comparing side by side rather than taking any single launch announcement at face value. Not every brand on that list is still growing the way it started.
Five launches, five different outcomes
| Brand | Entered India | Structure | Where it stands |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jimmy Choo | 2007 | Retail partnership | Still expanding — six stores across Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata, 19 years in |
| Tiffany & Co. | 2019 (JV) | Joint venture with RBL | Slow, deliberate rollout — Delhi and Mumbai flagships, no mass expansion |
| Gap | 2022 | Franchise agreement | Re-entry after an earlier, unrelated Indian run (via Arvind Fashions) ended in 2020 |
| Clarks | 2022 | Joint venture (Clarks Reliance Footwear) | Terminated 2024 — all 32 stores closed after two years |
| SKIMS | 2026 | Exclusive partnership | Just launched — Delhi and Mumbai first |
Two things stand out. First, structure doesn't predict outcome on its own — Jimmy Choo's simple retail partnership has outlasted Clarks' more formal joint venture by more than a decade, and Tiffany's JV has been stable while Clarks' JV wasn't. Second, category matters more than deal paperwork. Jimmy Choo and Tiffany both sell aspirational, low-frequency luxury goods where a handful of flagship stores in Delhi and Mumbai can carry a brand for years without needing mass footprint. Clarks was selling everyday footwear into a price band where Indian buyers already have deep, entrenched domestic and international competition — a category where six stores in two cities isn't a beachhead, it's a rounding error against the volume the format needs to work.
It's also worth noting what isn't on RBL's list. Victoria's Secret operates in India through the Apparel Group, a separate operator entirely — a reminder that Reliance doesn't have, and hasn't sought, exclusive access to every global brand looking at India. RBL picks its bets.
The Gap case is the closest precedent, and it's a mixed one
Gap's history in India is really two separate stories that get flattened into one in most coverage. The first run was through Arvind Fashions, an entirely different Indian operator with no RBL involvement, and it ended in 2020 — a casualty of both pandemic disruption and a broader struggle to make Gap's basics-and-denim positioning work at the price point Indian buyers expected from it. RBL's 2022 franchise agreement was not a continuation of that run; it was a full restart, with a new operator, a new store format and, going by RBL's usual playbook, a different approach to pricing and merchandise mix than the version that had already failed once in the same market.
That makes Gap the closest thing on this list to SKIMS' actual situation: a brand with genuine global recognition attempting a second, better-resourced push into India after the category's economics proved harder than expected the first time around. SKIMS doesn't carry Gap's specific baggage — it has never previously tried and failed in India — but the underlying test is the same one Gap is still working through: whether a globally recognised name can convert brand awareness into a price point and a store network that actually clears at Indian retail volumes, rather than surviving as a handful of flagship stores subsidised by the parent's other, more established brands.
A category RBL has never actually run before
Look past the brand names on the roster and a pattern in RBL's business emerges: almost everything on it is either outerwear, footwear, accessories or occasion-driven luxury — categories where a shopper buys occasionally, deliberates for days or weeks, and where six stores in two metros can plausibly serve a national customer base because the customer will travel or wait for the item. Shapewear and loungewear are neither. They are everyday-wear categories, worn under other clothes or around the house, bought in multiples, replaced often, and — critically — a category India already has a mature, India-first competitive set for: Zivame, Clovia and Enamor built their businesses specifically on solving fit, sizing and price for the Indian body and the Indian wallet, online-first, years before SKIMS existed as a company.
That is a genuinely different competitive problem than the one Jimmy Choo, Tiffany or even Gap faced walking in. Those brands were competing against the idea that Indian shoppers might not spend on Western luxury or Western basics at all — a demand-existence question. SKIMS is competing in a category where Indian demand demonstrably exists and is already being served by domestic players with years of fit data, established price points and existing distribution. The question for SKIMS isn't whether Indian shoppers will buy premium shapewear — they already do — it's whether they'll pay a global premium for it over domestic alternatives built specifically for them.
Where SKIMS actually sits
SKIMS is neither Jimmy Choo nor Clarks. It's a category RBL hasn't run in India before at this scale: contemporary, DTC-native shapewear and loungewear, priced well below Tiffany or Balenciaga but well above a mass domestic label — closer to premium than luxury. That puts it in unfamiliar territory for the comparison table above, which is exactly why the launch is more interesting than the press release lets on.
What SKIMS has that Clarks didn't is a level of pre-existing brand recognition among Indian shoppers that a legacy British shoe brand simply never had — SKIMS launched in London, Dubai, Hong Kong and Seoul before India, building a following well ahead of a single store opening, the way modern DTC brands are built to travel. What it doesn't have yet is proof that recognition converts into the kind of repeat, higher-frequency purchasing that shapewear and loungewear — an everyday-wear category, not an occasion-wear one — actually needs to sustain more than two flagship stores.
RBL's own history suggests it knows the difference between these two kinds of bets, even if the launch-day language never admits it. Its slowest, most deliberate rollouts — Tiffany chief among them — have consistently gone to categories where brand mystique matters more than volume, while its fastest-scaling names sit in categories closer to daily-wear, where the company already has distribution muscle through the wider Reliance Retail network to draw on. Where SKIMS ends up on that spectrum, in terms of how quickly RBL moves past the Delhi and Mumbai flagships, will itself be a signal of which bet the company thinks it has made — before any sales data confirms it either way.
What actually decides this
That is the same fork Clarks and Jimmy Choo sat at in their first year, and it took each of them the better part of a decade to resolve in opposite directions. Jimmy Choo won that fork by staying small and letting scarcity do the work luxury retail depends on. Clarks lost it by trying to compete on volume in a category where it had no structural pricing or distribution advantage over entrenched domestic players. SKIMS is now running the same experiment in a category — everyday intimate wear — where India's domestic competitors are arguably stronger, and more fit-tuned to the local customer, than anything Clarks faced from Bata or Woodland in footwear.
The Delhi and Mumbai stores opening this month won't answer the question. Whether RBL is still running SKIMS stores in 2029, and how many cities it's running them in, will.
