Most activewear brands were built for athletes. Minu Margeret wanted to build one for Indian women who just wanted their leggings to fit.

At 5'2", she kept buying activewear that rolled down at the waist, rode up during a squat, or came in a length made for a taller frame. Every woman she trained with had some version of the same complaint. So in 2020, instead of switching brands again, she started building one.

The ₹160 crore round is the latest chapter. The story began years earlier, with a founder trying to solve a problem she experienced herself.

Ankle-length leggings built for the height of Western women kept ending up as three-quarter fits on Minu Margeret's 5'2" frame. Waistbands rolled down mid-workout. Fabric that stretched wasn't durable, and fabric that was durable didn't stretch enough. She wasn't trying to build a startup when this started. She was trying to solve her own wardrobe problem.

That frustration came from someone who understood movement at a competitive level. Margeret is a national-level Ultimate Frisbee player, which matters more than it looks. Someone who competes at that level knows exactly what bad activewear feels like mid-movement, not in a fitting room mirror.

Her resume reads like rigour: business analyst at Goldman Sachs, then Wipro, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and PhonePe, with an MBA from the Indian School of Business along the way. But rigour wasn't what got her to BlissClub. Frustration was.

Her first real attempt at entrepreneurship wasn't BlissClub, either. Between corporate stints, she tried a clothing rental startup called Rent Your Wardrobe, modelled on the American company Rent The Runway. It didn't work. She didn't force it. When BlissClub's version of the same instinct, discomfort with the products in front of her, came along, she moved on it instead.

As Margeret has put it about the brand's approach: BlissClub builds for "everybody and every body."

BlissClub isn't riding a fad. It's riding three trends that converged at the same time.

Athleisure has moved from a niche category to default wardrobe behaviour, accelerated by remote and hybrid work habits that never fully reversed after the pandemic. Fitness culture among Indian women has expanded well beyond gyms into yoga, home workouts, and everyday movement. And D2C as a distribution model has matured to the point where a founder can build a national brand without ever depending on a large retailer's shelf space.

India's activewear market was valued at roughly ₹158 billion in 2021 and was projected to grow to ₹402 billion by 2025. BlissClub built its foundation during exactly that window.

India's women's activewear penetration sits at roughly 2 percent of total apparel spend. In the US and UK, that number is 20 to 30 percent, according to Elevation Capital's assessment when it backed the company at seed stage. That gap alone tells you the category was underbuilt, not oversaturated.

But the deeper problem wasn't demand. It was design. Most activewear sold in India, whether imported or manufactured locally, was built on sizing charts and body proportions designed for Western frames, then adapted for the Indian market rather than built for it from scratch.

Nobody was solving what BlissClub's team internally calls the "deep squat problem": clothes that looked like activewear but didn't actually let a woman move the way her workout demanded.

Global performance brands designed for athletes first, everyday women second. Decathlon built for affordability and volume, not fit precision. Premium international labels solved for aesthetics but rarely for the specific mechanics of Indian body types and Indian movement habits, like sitting on the floor, deep squatting, or bending in ways Western activewear wasn't cut for.

This is where BlissClub's actual differentiation lives.

The brand runs on what it calls a fabric-first philosophy. Its R&D has produced a library of proprietary fabric technologies, including CloudSoft, EverFlow, SculptCotton, PetalRib, BareButter, RibSupreme, Blissterry, AirMelt, CottonPro, AeroCool, and Windknit, each engineered for a different combination of stretch, breathability, and recovery suited to the Indian climate. Its signature CloudSoft fabric, used in its bestselling leggings, is built from a 27 percent spandex and 73 percent polyester blend, calibrated specifically to hold stretch without losing shape over repeated wear.

The design details are deliberate, not incidental:

None of this is marketing language. It's the product roadmap. BlissClub's own team describes its design process as community input, prototype, iteration, then launch, in that order. Products aren't built and then marketed. They're built with the customer already in the room.

BlissClub didn't launch with a product. It launched with a conversation.

During the Covid lockdowns of 2020, when production itself was difficult, Margeret used Instagram to talk about fitness, movement, and the specific frustrations women were having with their activewear. That became BlissQueens, a branded community built around a simple hashtag: #KeepMoving. The brand has since grown that community to over 185,000 followers on Instagram alone.

The flywheel looked like this:

Problem → Community → Product → Funding

Instagram conversation, then WhatsApp and Facebook groups, then direct feedback on what women actually needed, then prototypes tested against that feedback, then product launch, then sales, then the capital to do it again at scale.

Elevation Capital, which backed BlissClub at seed stage, noted the company grew 25 times in the 10 months between its seed round and Series A. That kind of growth doesn't come from an ad budget. It comes from an audience that was already convinced before the product existed.

This is also why BlissClub's marketing rarely centres on the clothes themselves. The content is about the feeling of movement, not the item being sold.

BlissClub sells across four channels: its own website and app, third-party ecommerce marketplaces, and more than 40 physical retail stores in cities including Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Surat, Gurugram, and Indore.

Each channel exists for a different reason. D2C through the website and app keeps margins and customer data with BlissClub directly, and it's where the brand started. Marketplaces extend reach to shoppers who default to platforms like Myntra rather than standalone brand sites. Physical stores solve the one problem ecommerce structurally can't: letting a woman try on a legging and feel the fit before she buys it, which matters enormously for a fit-obsessed brand. The retail expansion is recent and deliberate, not a hedge against ecommerce slowing down.

Revenue growth explains part of it. The mechanics behind that growth explain the rest.

FY25 revenue grew 51 percent while losses were cut by more than half, from ₹44 crore to ₹20 crore. That's not just growth, it's growth getting more efficient at the same time, which is a much harder combination to pull off. BlissClub's own numbers show it spent ₹1.18 to earn every rupee of revenue in FY25, down from a worse ratio the year before.

Sandeep Bapat, Co-Chief Investment Officer at Singularity AMC, said the fund had been "impressed with how the BlissClub team has thoughtfully built a strong brand." That statement, paired with capital, is the clearest signal of why this round happened now.

Add to that: the offline retail bet appears to be working, the brand expanded into menswear this year without abandoning its core, and two of its own founders, Margeret and her partner Vidit Aatrey, put personal capital into a round they had no obligation to join. For investors like Singularity coming in fresh, that combination, improving unit economics plus founder conviction, is a stronger signal than growth alone.

Investors weren't funding a leggings company. They were funding a product development system that had already proven it could repeatedly turn customer insight into demand.

BlissClub is still not profitable. A negative 15.09 percent EBITDA margin and negative 44.57 percent ROCE in FY25 mean the company remains in investment mode, funded by outside capital rather than its own cash flow. It laid off roughly 18 percent of its workforce in 2025 amid cash burn pressure, a reminder that even brands with strong topline growth aren't immune to a tighter funding environment.

Competition is also closing in from multiple directions: Decathlon's Domyos on price, Cultsport and HRX on mass reach, and newer entrants like Kica Active and Cava Athleisure on the same fit-and-comfort positioning BlissClub built its name on.

The bigger question is one every category-defining D2C brand eventually faces: can BlissClub become bigger than leggings? Mamaearth, boAt, and The Souled Store have all had to answer some version of this. BlissClub has already pushed into menswear and lifestyle categories. Whether it becomes a broader movement and wellness brand, or stays anchored to activewear as its core, will likely define its next funding round more than this one did.

Any competitor can copy a waistband. It's much harder to copy years of customer trust, product iteration, and community feedback. That's where BlissClub's real moat may lie.

BlissClub's real thesis was never "activewear for India." It's product before growth. Every major decision in this company's history, killing the first idea that didn't work, listening to a community before building for it, engineering fabric technology instead of relabelling generic stock, and only expanding into stores once the fit was already proven online, was made in that order. The ₹160 crore now sitting in its account isn't a reward for growth. It's a bet that a founder who has consistently put the product first will keep doing so at a much bigger scale. Whether BlissClub becomes India's first billion-dollar women's activewear brand depends less on how fast it grows from here, and more on whether it keeps that order intact.

If it succeeds, BlissClub won't just build another apparel company. It could redefine how Indian consumer brands are built, from the product outward, rather than from the marketing inward.