Every influencer launches skincare. Some launch makeup. Others launch a fashion label with their name on the tag.

Kusha Kapila chose shapewear. A category most creators avoid, because it does not run on aesthetics alone. It runs on sizing, compression, fabric science, and the kind of customer trust that takes years to build, not a launch reel.

So why would one of India's biggest digital creators enter one of the hardest categories in fashion to get right?

The answer says more about how modern consumer brands get built than it does about Kusha Kapila the celebrity. This is not the story of a creator launching a product. It is the story of how years of listening to an audience became the foundation for a real business.

UnderNeat, by the numbers:

Timeline:

Kusha Kapila is a NIFT graduate who built her name as one of India's most recognisable digital creators, known for sketches and characters that made her feel less like a celebrity and more like a friend who happened to be online. That distinction mattered later. Her audience, largely women, had spent years sending her comments, DMs, and stories about everyday frustrations, including what they wore under their clothes. By the time she decided to build a brand, she was not starting with a blank slate. She was starting with years of unstructured consumer research that most founders spend crores trying to collect.

Indian women have long been underserved by a shapewear market built around imported sizing and imported assumptions. Standard shapewear tends to run tight in the wrong places, trap heat in Indian weather, and ignore body types and garments, like sarees, that the category was never designed around. Kusha did not invent this problem. She surfaced it. In December 2024, months before UnderNeat existed as a product, she started an Instagram series called "What Are You Wearing Under?", where she asked her audience directly about their innerwear frustrations. It looked like content. It was actually market research conducted in public, months ahead of a single product being sold.

The timing is not incidental. Indian D2C has matured past the phase where launching a website and running ads was enough to build a brand, and consumers now expect a real point of view, not just a product. Creator-led brands have moved from novelty to mainstream in the last few years, with enough successful examples globally, Skims chief among them, that investors no longer treat "founder is an influencer" as a red flag on its own. Indian women are also spending more on premium innerwear online than they were even three years ago, as comfort with online sizing and returns has grown. And body positivity conversations have shifted what customers expect from a shapewear brand: representation and comfort, not just compression. UnderNeat launched into a moment where all four of these shifts were already underway, rather than trying to create them from scratch.

Compared with shapewear, skincare and beauty are more common first categories for creators because manufacturing and product development can often be simpler. Shapewear is the opposite. It is harder to enter, but once a brand earns fit and trust, customers do not shop around the way they do for a serum. It is a daily-use, repeat-purchase category with premium positioning and real white space in India. The market itself is sizeable, with India's broader lingerie and innerwear category estimated at around 7 billion dollars, and shapewear specifically valued near 5 billion dollars and growing on rising incomes and online adoption. Most existing players, from Zivame to Clovia to Enamor, compete on affordability or availability. Almost none were built specifically around Indian body types from day one. That gap became UnderNeat's opening.

This is where the founder story becomes a business story. Kusha's advantage was never fame by itself. It was three specific assets that most first-time founders spend years and lakhs trying to build.

The first was audience insight. Years of comments and DMs meant she already knew, in granular detail, what frustrated Indian women about their innerwear, long before she wrote a single product brief.

The second was distribution. UnderNeat's Instagram account crossed 100,000 followers before it sold a single product, and jumped further within days of launch, because the audience had already been engaged for months.

The third was brand trust. People already knew her, which meant a lower cost of acquiring a first customer than almost any founder starting from zero could hope for. A brand audit of UnderNeat has directly compared this playbook to Kim Kardashian's Skims, another creator-led shapewear brand that used influencer trust and body-inclusive messaging to scale fast. The difference is context. Skims entered a market where shapewear was already mainstream. UnderNeat had to normalise the category in India first, which is the harder problem to solve.

This is not an influencer doing a brand deal with herself. This is startup thinking, applied to a category that rewards exactly that kind of audience-first approach.

Audience and trust get a brand attention. They do not get it manufactured, sized correctly, or delivered on time. That is where Vimarsh Razdan comes in. A graduate of NIFT Delhi and IIM Calcutta, Razdan spent 15 years scaling a fashion business from 35 crore to 500 crore in revenue, working with global names including Marks & Spencer, Gap, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren. In 2020, he co-founded Attic Salt with his wife and grew it profitably to over 80 employees. He brought the operational discipline, sourcing relationships, and manufacturing expertise that creator-led brands typically lack, and that is usually the reason they stall after a strong launch. Kusha built the demand. Razdan built the machine that could actually fulfil it. Most influencer brands fail without an operator like this in place.

UnderNeat's product range spans shaping shorts, bodysuits, saree-specific shapewear, backless styles, and everyday bras, priced roughly between 800 and 2,500 rupees depending on the style. That places it in the mass-premium band, above budget players but below international luxury brands. The bigger differentiator is design intent. Products are built around Indian body proportions and Indian garments specifically, with saree shapewear as a category that most global brands like Skims would never think to build, because the need does not exist in their markets. Fabric choices lean toward breathable, moisture-wicking, four-way stretch materials suited to Indian heat and humidity, an area where imported shapewear has historically struggled. Sizing runs from XS through plus sizes across multiple cup options, a wider range than several established Indian competitors offer.

UnderNeat sells direct-to-consumer through its own website, which gives it the customer data it is now using to plan a measured entry into offline retail, rather than a blanket rollout. Marketing has been almost entirely creator-led and organic, built on the "What Are You Wearing Under?" content series and word of mouth from real customers rather than paid celebrity endorsement in the traditional sense. Pricing sits deliberately in the mass-premium zone, positioned to feel earned rather than aspirational, and aimed at women who want better fit without paying international prices.

The D2C-first choice is also a margin decision, not just a control decision. Shapewear carries meaningfully better gross margins than basic innerwear because customers pay for fit and comfort engineering, not just fabric, and selling direct means UnderNeat keeps that margin instead of handing a cut to a marketplace. It also means the brand owns its customer data from day one, which is exactly what it is now using to decide where to open offline. Skipping marketplaces early avoids race-to-the-bottom price competition against Zivame and Clovia on their own turf.

The real economics test is whether UnderNeat's low customer acquisition cost, inherited from Kusha's existing audience, holds up as a durable advantage rather than a one-time launch benefit. A cheap first customer only compounds into a good business if repeat purchase rates stay high once the initial follower-driven demand cools. That is the CAC-to-LTV question every creator-led brand eventually has to answer, and it is where UnderNeat's actual unit economics, not its follower count, will decide the outcome. Existing investor Ghazal Alagh, co-founder of Honasa Consumer, has stayed involved through the brand's funding rounds, which adds a credible consumer-brand builder to the cap table beyond Kusha's own audience. For Fireside Ventures, a firm that has specialised in early-stage Indian consumer brands, the bet is less about Kusha's fame and more about the pattern behind it: a founder who validated demand in public before spending on manufacturing, entering a category with real repeat-purchase economics and clear white space against slower-moving incumbents.

Where UnderNeat sits versus the competition:

UnderNeat's strategy at a glance:

None of this is a guaranteed win. UnderNeat operates in a genuinely competitive category, up against Reliance-owned Zivame, Clovia, and Enamor, all of which have years of manufacturing scale and distribution behind them. Customer retention will matter more than launch-day hype once the initial audience has been converted once. The brand's identity is still closely tied to Kusha's own relevance, which is the defining risk of every creator-led business, and it will need to prove it can grow beyond her personal following. Maintaining product quality while scaling manufacturing, and expanding into new categories without diluting focus, are the tests every fast-growing D2C brand eventually faces.

That leads to the one question that will define UnderNeat's next few years more than any of the others: can it become bigger than Kusha Kapila? Every creator-led brand eventually has to survive its founder's fame becoming less central to the business. UnderNeat has not had to answer that question yet.

An engaged audience is not just for engagement. Treated correctly, it is free customer research, months ahead of a product brief. Solve a real, specific problem before you build a brand around it, not the other way around. Storytelling can lower your cost of acquiring a first customer, but it cannot replace an operator who understands manufacturing and supply chains. Personal brand gets you attention on day one. Repeat purchases, not launch-day hype, are what make a business last.

Founder Office Lens

TEP Verdict: UnderNeat isn't trying to prove that celebrities can sell products. It's trying to prove that creators can build enduring consumer companies. The audience gave it an early advantage, but that advantage has an expiration date. From here, repeat purchases, product quality, and operational execution will matter far more than follower count. If UnderNeat succeeds, it won't be because Kusha Kapila is famous. It will be because customers keep returning even after the novelty wears off.