She Built the Community Before She Built the Leggings — The Unstoppable Story of Blissclub

Minu Margeret is 5'2". She is a national-level Ultimate Frisbee player. She holds an MBA from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. She has built her career at Goldman Sachs, Wipro Technologies, Unilever, Anheuser-Busch InBev, and PhonePe — a resume that speaks to both rigour and range.

And yet, for years, every time she needed to find activewear to train in, she came home frustrated.

Ankle-length leggings designed for the height of Western women would end up as three-quarter fits on her frame. Sports bras in her size range were rare. Shorts for women that fell to the knee — the kind she could wear at 5:30 AM while heading to frisbee practice without worrying about how she looked — simply did not exist. She wore boys' shorts instead. When she travelled internationally, she would buy armfuls of activewear — items she later discovered were manufactured in India, Sri Lanka, or Bangladesh. She was flying halfway around the world to buy things made in her own country, because no Indian brand was building them for her.

"I would always wear boys' shorts," she has recalled. "We are in 2021, and there is no apparel."

The frustration accumulated over years of athletic life. And when the pandemic arrived in March 2020, it did not slow her down. It clarified her.

Minu Margaret founded Blissclub in March 2020. But she did something that most founders don't — she built the community before she built the product.

A Room Before a Product

In the early months of 2020, with India locked down and production of physical goods nearly impossible, Minu did not sit idle waiting for the world to open. She went online.

She started a community on Instagram and WhatsApp — a space for Indian women to talk about fitness, share their movement journeys, challenge each other, and be honest about what was missing from their lives and wardrobes. She ran online yoga sessions. She launched a 21-day movement challenge. She asked women directly: what do you need? What doesn't work? What have you given up trying to find?

The community told her.

They talked about leggings that compressed too aggressively and left marks on their skin. About fabrics that felt like plastic, not performance. About the complete absence of pockets — forcing women to carry bags to every workout, tuck their phones into waistbands, or simply leave essential items at home. About how the entire activewear market in India had been designed by men, for men, then resized as an afterthought for women.

Every conversation was a product brief. Every complaint was a specification.

By December 2020 — nine months after founding, nine months of community building — Blissclub launched its first product. It was called The Ultimate Leggings. It had four pockets: enough to hold a phone, headphones, cash, and a key. It was built for Indian women's body types and heights. It did not compress. It stretched the way a performance garment should.

"Pockets are honestly empowering," Minu has said. "They liberate us from the shackles of having to carry a bag all the time. A pocket is not just a design element; it is a path to empowerment."

The community that had spent nine months being heard immediately responded. The Ultimate Leggings sold out.

The Funding That Followed the Community

In May 2021, Blissclub raised $2.25 million in seed funding, led by Elevation Capital — previously SAIF Partners. The angel investors who joined that round were not passive capital. They were a statement: Neeraj Arora, former Chief Business Officer of WhatsApp; Kunal Shah, founder of CRED; Rahul Mehta, Managing Partner at DST; Ashish Goel, founder of Urban Ladder; Chakradhar Gade, founder of Country Delight; and Pam Lee, a former Lululemon executive.

A former executive from the world's most celebrated women's activewear brand had just backed Blissclub. That detail alone was a product review.

From May 2021 to May 2022, Blissclub grew its revenue 33 times. It went from early traction to ₹70 crore in annual revenue in a single year — a pace of growth that forced the investment community to pay serious attention.

In May 2022, Blissclub raised $18 million in its Series A round, led by Eight Roads Ventures and Elevation Capital. The new investors joining the round included Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety, Mamaearth co-founder Ghazal Alagh, former Myntra CEO Amar Nagaram, and SoftBank executives — a cap table that read less like a funding event and more like a collective endorsement from India's most credible consumer brand builders.

Total funding raised across all rounds stands at $21.6 million from 37 investors.

In FY25, Blissclub posted ₹135 crore in revenue.

What Blissclub Actually Built

The product philosophy at Blissclub has never been about adding another pair of leggings to a crowded market. It has been about engineering out, one by one, the specific failures that Indian women had accepted as inevitable.

The fabrics are technical — chosen for stretch, recovery, breathability, and longevity. The sizing is built for the range of Indian women's bodies, not imported from a sizing chart designed for Western physiques. The cuts account for Indian heights. The waistbands do not roll. The seams do not dig. And every legging has pockets — functional, real, phone-sized pockets.

The brand expanded beyond leggings into sports bras, shorts, tops, co-ord sets, and everyday wear — all developed through the same process: community input, prototype testing, iteration, and launch. Products are not designed in a vacuum and pushed to market. They are built in collaboration with the people who will wear them.

"We worked with the community to build the products," Minu has said. "It is the community that has built these products."

Blissclub was also among the first Indian activewear brands to build an inclusive size range — recognising that plus-sized Indian women had been especially underserved by a market that treated size diversity as an afterthought. The founding value — "we build for everybody and every body" — is operational, not decorative.

A Marketing Strategy That Nobody Else Was Running

Blissclub's approach to marketing is the most distinctive thing about the brand — and the hardest to imitate.

Community was the product, not the channel. Most brands build a product and then build a community around it. Blissclub inverted the sequence entirely. The community existed before the product. When The Ultimate Leggings launched in December 2020, it was being released to thousands of women who had already been heard, who had already contributed to what was being made, and who already felt ownership over what was coming. That is not marketing. That is architecture.

"We want to be a faceless brand." Minu has been explicit about this goal: Blissclub is deliberately built so that no single face — including hers — is more important than the community. While she speaks publicly and has been recognised in lists of emerging women leaders, the brand's Instagram, community events, and content centre the customers, not the founder. This is the opposite of the founder-as-influencer playbook that most D2C brands run in India. It creates brand loyalty that does not depend on any individual.

The #KeepMoving philosophy as content strategy. Blissclub's content is not about products. It is about movement — the joy of it, the challenge of it, the way it makes women feel rather than look. The brand's recurring hashtag — #KeepMoving — is an invitation, not a transaction. Online fitness challenges, community events, open conversations about body image and fitness culture: these are the content formats Blissclub invests in. They attract women who are not ready to buy yet, keep them engaged until they are, and retain them after.

Word of mouth as the primary growth engine. In its early days, Blissclub spent almost nothing on paid advertising. The women who found the community told other women. The women who wore The Ultimate Leggings were asked about them. The product did the marketing. At a time when most D2C brands were burning advertising budgets to acquire customers, Blissclub was building organic retention. The 33x revenue growth in a single year was not paid for by ads — it was earned by community.

Milestones that money cannot manufacture. In 2022, LinkedIn named Blissclub one of India's Top 25 Startups — the first and only activewear and women's brand to make the list. It was one of the youngest companies on the list, making it in just two years from founding. These kinds of recognitions are not applied for; they are earned through the quality of what is being built internally. They function as third-party endorsements of the brand's culture and trajectory.

The Larger Vision

Minu Margeret has never described Blissclub as just an activewear brand. She has described it as a platform — one whose mission is to "spread happiness through movement" and to make an active life accessible, comfortable, and joyful for half a billion Indian women.

She has spoken about wanting Blissclub to eventually be the first Indian activewear brand to go global — to reverse the direction of a trade that has always flowed one way, with Indian women buying products manufactured in their own country but sold to them through Western brands.

The global reference point she invokes is Lululemon — a $45 billion company built entirely on the active lifestyle of women. India's women's activewear market is still a fraction of what it should be relative to men's. The gap is the opportunity. And Blissclub, built community-first in Bengaluru in March 2020, is positioned to lead it.

From a personal frustration on a frisbee field in Hyderabad, to ₹135 crore in annual revenue, to a community of hundreds of thousands of Indian women who feel genuinely seen by a brand — Blissclub has done something that most companies spend years trying to achieve and many never do.

It made the customer the founder.

And the customer has not looked back.