One Indian Sneaker Sold Out in 12 Hours at ₹15,000. Another Can't Be Bought at Any Price. Here's Why That's the Same Strategy Twice.

In June, a New Delhi streetwear label called Almost Gods released its first-ever sneaker. Two hundred and fifty pairs, priced at ₹15,000 each — more than most Indian buyers spend on a laptop bag, let alone footwear from a brand with no sneaker track record. They sold out in twelve hours.

This month, a soft-drink brand and a hand-lasted Delhi sneaker label did something stranger. Thums Up and Gully Labs built a sneaker that is, on paper, extremely cheap: ₹5,000, and it's free. You cannot buy it. You can only win it, by finishing third through twenty-second on a daily leaderboard in a swipe game called Thunder Trail, running through November 3. Beat the game, find a hidden "Redeem Now" link, enter a code, and a pair of Gully Number 001s in "Toofani Blue" or "Thunder White" — with a detachable bottle-cap charm — ships to you at a checkout price of zero.

Two campaigns, four months apart, aimed at the same six-word problem every brand in this category is trying to solve: how do you make a sneaker that people want more for being hard to get, in a market that didn't use to think that way about Indian-made shoes.

The two models, side by side

Almost Gods is selling scarcity the way the global sneaker industry has sold it for twenty years: a real retail price, a hard production cap, and a drop. Dhruv Khurana spent eight years building Almost Gods as a streetwear label before putting a sneaker into the lineup, and the Tether's design — wraparound lacing, layered panelling, brushed suede, drawing on a German army trainer silhouette and a Brutalist sensibility — reads as a deliberate rejection of logo-heavy hype design. It was made in an NCR factory that also produces for COS and Armani, which is itself part of the pitch: this is not a knockoff aesthetic, it's the same manufacturing quality as brands Indian buyers already associate with price and taste. Selling out 250 pairs in half a day, at ₹15,000, is Almost Gods proving a point the Indian sneaker scene has been trying to prove for years — that a homegrown label can carry real price power, not discount-rack pricing, if the product and the scarcity are both real.

Gully Labs and Thums Up are not selling a product at all. They're selling access to a chance, and the chance is the entire marketing mechanic. A cola brand attaching itself to a ₹5,000 hand-lasted sneaker and then refusing to let anyone simply pay for it is a more aggressive scarcity play than Almost Gods', not a softer one — it removes the one lever every previous drop still offered a frustrated buyer: paying more. There's no "sold out" page to screenshot and no secondary listing to chase, because nothing has sold. If a market forms around this shoe at all, it won't be around the shoe — it'll be around the redemption codes themselves, and a code is worth exactly whatever a stranger on Telegram tells you it's worth. That is a resale market with no underlying asset, which is a genuinely new shape for Indian sneaker culture to have produced.

Why this is happening in India right now

Neither drop is an accident of timing. India's sneaker market was valued at roughly $3.98 billion in 2025 and is projected to nearly double to $6.53 billion by 2034, and the growth story inside that number is specifically about authentication platforms and secondary markets maturing — the infrastructure that makes "limited" mean something to a buyer now exists here in a way it didn't five years ago. Brands on both ends of the price spectrum are responding to the same shift: there is finally a resale culture in India sophisticated enough to make artificial scarcity work as a strategy, rather than just looking like stock-outs.

That's also why the two approaches diverge the way they do. Almost Gods is playing a long game about brand equity — it wants ₹15,000 to feel earned, so that the next drop can charge ₹18,000 and still sell out, the way GOAT and StockX pricing has trained global buyers to expect appreciation on scarce releases. Thums Up doesn't need the sneaker to hold value next year; it needs the swipe game played every day through November 3, and a free, unbuyable, visually loud sneaker is a more efficient engagement mechanic than a discount code ever was. One brand is building a sneaker business. The other is renting sneaker culture's attention for a beverage campaign, for exactly as long as the campaign runs.

Why a cola brand is the one pushing this hardest

It's worth sitting with who is actually running the more extreme scarcity play here, because it isn't the sneaker label. Gully Labs makes the shoe; Thums Up — a Coca-Cola India brand with zero history in footwear — is the one that decided the product should be unbuyable. That's a strange move for a company whose entire commercial existence depends on being purchased by as many people as possible, as often as possible, at a bottle at a time. A soft drink brand has no natural reason to understand or want artificial scarcity. It has every reason to want reach.

The answer is that Thums Up isn't selling the sneaker at all, and never intended to. It's selling thirty-odd days of daily engagement with a swipe game, wrapped in enough streetwear credibility — borrowed entirely from Gully Labs — to make a teenager open the app again tomorrow instead of once. Every mechanic in the campaign points at retention, not retail: a leaderboard that resets daily, a window that runs more than four weeks, and a reward tier (third through twentieth place, not first) that's deliberately winnable by a lot of people rather than reserved for the single best player. Twenty winners a day, every day, for five weeks, is a far bigger total giveaway pool than a one-off 250-pair drop — it's just sized and metered to keep people coming back rather than sold in one flood.

This is a pattern global beverage and FMCG brands have been testing for a few years — borrow subculture credibility rather than build it, because building it takes a decade and Almost Gods-style brand equity, and borrowing it takes one licensing conversation and a swipe-game build. What's new is seeing it land in India with this much production value, and specifically in sneakers rather than streetwear apparel, which has historically been the easier, cheaper category for a non-endemic brand to dabble in. A shoe is a harder product to fake credibility around than a T-shirt; sneaker buyers notice construction, materials and silhouette choices in a way that print-on-a-blank apparel collabs can mostly skate past. That Thums Up went straight for a hand-lasted sneaker, rather than a safer co-branded hoodie, says the brand is betting specifically on sneaker culture's audience being worth the harder, more expensive credibility test.

What to watch

Almost Gods' real test isn't the Tether — it's whether drop two holds the same velocity without the novelty of "first sneaker from this label" doing half the work. A second sellout at a higher price is the only proof that ₹15,000 was about the product and not the moment.

Thums Up's test is uglier and faster: whether redemption codes start trading hands before November 3 for real money, which would mean the "you can't buy this" pitch collapsed into exactly the resale market it was designed to avoid — just one step removed, and with no sneaker company collecting any of it.

Either outcome is a useful data point for every other FMCG and beverage brand watching from the sidelines, deciding whether sneaker culture is worth borrowing against or whether it's a subculture that notices being used and resents it. India's sneaker buyers have spent years being treated as an afterthought market for global drops. How they respond to being treated as a marketing surface, instead, is the thing actually worth tracking into November.