Four Engineers Who'd Never Owned a Fashion Store Built India's Fastest-Growing Gen Z Brand — The Story of NEWME

In June 2020, the Indian government banned TikTok and several other Chinese apps, including popular fashion platforms that had quietly built enormous audiences among India's youngest consumers. One of the most significant vacuums left behind was in fast fashion. A generation of Indian women aged 18 to 26 had grown accustomed to scrolling through new styles daily, ordering trendy, affordable pieces within moments of discovering them, and expressing themselves through fashion with a speed and frequency that traditional Indian fashion retail had never been designed to support.

Zara had the trends but not the price. Zudio had the price but not the speed. Myntra had the platform but no distinct identity of its own.

The question that four founders asked themselves — and could not let go of — was this: how do you bring trends faster than Zara, at one-third the price?

That question became NEWME.

The Four Engineers Who Built a Fashion Brand

Sumit Jasoria, Shivam Tripathi, Vinod Naik, and Himanshu Chaudhary did not come from fashion. Sumit holds an MBA from FMS Delhi and brought with him a background as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. His co-founders brought deep experience in retail operations, supply chain management, and technology. Together, they represented a team that understood how to build businesses, how to manage logistics, and how to use technology as a structural advantage — applied to a category none of them had worked in before.

That outsider perspective turned out to be precisely what the category needed.

In June 2022, in Bengaluru, NEWME launched as a direct-to-consumer fashion brand targeting Gen Z women across India. The founding vision was unambiguous: build a tech-first fashion brand that could put the right trends in front of the right consumer, faster and more affordably than any existing alternative, while creating an experience that felt genuinely built for the way young Indian women actually lived and shopped.

"Our journey began in June of 2022, guided by a shared vision among the four of us to cater to the evolving needs of Gen Z women who seek trends without compromise," Sumit Jasoria said.

Technology Where Fashion Brands Expected Intuition

The single most important decision NEWME made was choosing to treat fashion as a data problem.

Most fashion businesses in India — even successful ones — rely heavily on a designer's gut and a buyer's experience to decide what to stock and when. NEWME built trend dashboards instead. Every week, the product team reviews what has been trending globally and domestically across the preceding seven to eight days, cross-references it with real sales data from NEWME's own platform, and produces new styles based on that intersection. The result is a product pipeline that is empirically grounded rather than intuitively assembled.

The output of that system is extraordinary. NEWME drops over 500 trend-first styles every single week — a rate of new product introduction that no traditional Indian fashion brand comes close to matching. The product range spans casual wear, co-ords, dresses, loungewear, and an expanding array of lifestyle categories, all designed to meet the specific aesthetic sensibilities of the Gen Z consumer who has grown up scrolling through global fashion content and knows exactly what she wants.

The supply chain model that enables this speed is equally deliberate. NEWME operates with low minimum order quantities and an asset-light inventory model, reducing the risk of being left holding large quantities of styles that didn't land. Products are brought to market quickly, tested against real consumer demand, and reordered or retired based on actual performance rather than advance forecasting.

From ₹3.4 crore in revenue in FY23, NEWME grew to ₹180 crore in FY25 — a 52-times increase in under three years.

Online First, Offline Never Far Behind

NEWME launched as a D2C-first brand, building its customer base primarily through its own app and website. The digital channel remains the core of the business — approximately 73 percent of revenue flows through digital channels — and the NEWME app has been designed for the Gen Z shopping experience: visual, fast, personalised, and built around discovery rather than search.

But the founders made an unconventional decision thirteen months after launching online. They opened their first physical store.

The reasoning was deliberately counter-intuitive. Most D2C brands treat offline retail as a reluctant concession, opening stores only when digital acquisition costs rise or when investor pressure demands it. NEWME treated its first five stores as a learning lab — deliberately experimenting in offline retail early, before the pressure of scale made mistakes expensive, so that each new store refined the playbook for the next.

The physical stores were not called stores. They were called experience stores — a deliberate semantic choice reflecting the brand's belief that the Gen Z consumer who walks into a NEWME location is not just looking for product. She is looking for an aesthetic environment, a brand world, a space that embodies the energy and identity she sees in her feed.

Today, NEWME operates more than 22 stores across 12 cities, with a target of 50 fully company-owned stores by December 2026. Every store is company-owned — no franchise partnerships. NEWME controls the experience at every location.

NEWME Zip: Redefining Fast Fashion Literally

In one of its most distinctive product innovations, NEWME launched NEWME Zip — a 60-minute and 90-minute fashion delivery service, initially piloted in Delhi NCR and Bengaluru.

The service is supported by a network of dark stores, zonal hubs, and a real-time inventory engine that keeps high-demand styles stocked near areas of concentrated demand. The operational complexity of delivering a fashion order in under 60 minutes — managing SKUs across hundreds of styles, sizes, and colours at the speed of a food delivery platform — is significant. NEWME has built the infrastructure to do it.

NEWME Zip has since evolved into a 24/7 offering in key markets, making NEWME the only fashion brand in India offering round-the-clock, rapid-delivery access to over 1,500 styles. The service is not merely a logistics achievement — it is a brand statement about NEWME's understanding of its consumer. Gen Z does not plan purchases. She discovers, she wants, she orders. NEWME Zip exists to make that cycle as short as possible.

The Marketing Strategy That Speaks Gen Z Fluently

NEWME's marketing approach is built around the same principles as its product strategy: data-driven, fast, and authentically calibrated to the specific cultural universe of the Gen Z woman it serves.

Influencer-first marketing over mass advertising. NEWME built its early awareness not through television commercials or billboard campaigns but through a carefully assembled network of Gen Z creators and micro-influencers whose audiences matched the brand's target consumer precisely. In a generation that trusts peers over brands, and creators over celebrities, this approach generated the kind of organic, authentic recommendation that paid advertising cannot manufacture.

Co-creation as the celebrity partnership model. Rather than simply engaging Anushka Sen — one of India's most popular Gen Z figures — as a face to feature in a campaign, NEWME made her the Creative CEO of its first workwear collection, WorkSenIty. Anushka co-created the collection from concept to final fittings, curating over 500 styles that reflected her own understanding of what Gen Z women needed as they entered their first jobs and internships. The resulting campaign, #StaySenAtWork, was built around three digital ad films and was positioned as a cultural statement about self-expression at work rather than a product launch. This co-creation model produces campaigns that feel genuinely collaborative rather than transactional.

The experience store as marketing platform. Every NEWME experience store is designed to function as a brand environment rather than a retail point. The aesthetic, the product presentation, the fitting room experience — each element is crafted to be shareable and to reinforce the identity of a brand that exists at the intersection of fashion and self-expression. Customers who visit an experience store are, by design, being given content — an environment worth photographing, an experience worth describing to a friend.

Rapid collection drops as cultural content. Launching over 500 new styles every week is not just a supply chain achievement — it is a content strategy. Each weekly drop gives NEWME's social channels, its app, its creator partners, and its existing customers a reason to return, re-engage, and re-share. In a media environment where attention is scarce and content must be perpetually renewed, the weekly drop model generates a natural rhythm of discovery and engagement that sustains brand relevance without requiring constant advertising investment.

Category expansion as audience growth. The launch of WorkSenIty as NEWME's entry into workwear reflects a precise understanding of where its audience is headed. Gen Z women who discovered NEWME at 19 for weekend casuals are now 22 and entering the workforce. Rather than losing them to brands better suited to professional settings, NEWME followed them — building a category designed specifically for the life stage its core customer was entering. As Sumit Jasoria noted: "WorkSenIty is our way of evolving with them — showing up as they step into their first jobs, internships, startups, shoots, and side hustles."

What Comes After ₹180 Crore

NEWME has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Accel India with participation from Fireside Ventures and AUM Ventures, followed by a $12.14 million Series B that brought in Accel India, Fireside Ventures, Point72 Ventures, and AUM Ventures. The capital has been deployed into technology infrastructure, physical store expansion, and the dark-store network that powers NEWME Zip.

The brand has served over 20 lakh customers. It maintains more than 60 percent repeat purchase rates. It operates 73 percent of its business through digital channels. It ships across India and has ambitions to expand into Southeast Asia, targeting a combined addressable market of over 500 million Gen Z consumers.

The four engineers who never owned a fashion store in 2022 are now running one of India's fastest-growing fashion-tech businesses, built on the conviction that technology is fashion's most underutilised advantage — and that a generation which grew up online deserves a brand that was built the same way.

In the game of fashion, NEWME refuses to wait for the next season. It is already shipping the next week.