Skybags: How VIP Industries Built a Youth Brand That Grew as Big as Its Own Flagship

India's best-known luggage name for decades was VIP. Then the company launched a second brand aimed at younger customers, and the founder later said that brand had become as large, in terms of popularity, as the flagship itself.

A Brand Born Inside a Luggage House

Skybags comes from V.I.P. Industries, India's largest luggage maker. The company's own histories give slightly different dates for its beginnings: it was incorporated on January 27, 1968, and describes itself as established in 1971. Its founder, Dilip Piramal, remained closely involved, and his daughter Radhika Piramal served as Managing Director during the years Skybags was being built.

Skybags itself is a much more recent story. Although one student document dates it to 1982, VIP's own leadership and press materials say the brand was launched in 2011. Dilip Piramal described it in a Forbes India interview as the company's biggest success. It was launched for hypermarkets with a high-volume, low-margin strategy. In a 2015 announcement, the company described Skybags as launched as an independent brand in 2011, aimed at the youth, and known for its unique printed polycarbonate luggage and stylish backpacks. The company also says Skybags was the first Indian brand to make printed polycarbonate luggage.

A Brand for a Younger Traveller

The idea behind Skybags was straightforward. Luggage was a functional category, usually bought for a trip and rarely for self-expression. Skybags aimed to make bags a style choice. VIP's marketing leaders described the brand as built for today's youth, who are always on the go, and said more young people were travelling at an early age, making styling in bags a necessity.

The company's wider strategy was to run a multi-brand, multi-segment portfolio, investing consistently in advertising for all its major luggage brands. In the company's own description, Skybags sits in the mid segment and Aristocrat in the value segment, alongside the flagship VIP brand.

Casting the Face of Youth

Skybags leaned heavily on Bollywood's young stars. Early campaigns were led by actors including John Abraham and Varun Dhawan. In 2015, the company announced Varun Dhawan as its new brand ambassador, and the following year it unveiled a backpack collection with him at a press conference in Mumbai. VIP Industries' then Managing Director, Radhika Piramal, said the brand wanted to connect with a young audience that is fun-loving, vibrant, and has an edge, and the creative agency, Law & Kenneth Saatchi & Saatchi, built a campaign meant to be simple yet capture the fun and trendy spirit of the collection.

At the time, VIP's vice-president of marketing, Sudip Ghose, noted that luggage was already a large industry, around ₹3,000 crore, but that backpacks were a category consumers hardly knew yet. He said the company had started moving Skybags three years earlier to make it a bigger brand. Some years later, the brand turned to a different approach with football. For the FIFA World Cup season, Skybags introduced the first FIFA-licensed luggage range in India, with actor Kartik Aaryan as its brand ambassador and a campaign called "Let's Get Loud." VIP's marketing head described the aim as linking closely with millennial and Gen Z audiences who choose to express their style through travel accessories, in line with the brand's philosophy of "Move in Style."

The Marketing Strategy: Make the Bag a Statement

Skybags' marketing has a few distinctive elements.

Build the category, not just the brand. In 2016, VIP's own marketing lead acknowledged that backpacks were a category consumers didn't yet understand. That meant the brand was marketing the idea of a stylish backpack as much as its own product, a first-mover approach that gave it room to define what a youth backpack could be.

Use young stars as the voice. John Abraham, Varun Dhawan, and Kartik Aaryan were chosen for their appeal to young Indians. Each was used to launch product lines, from backpacks to the FIFA collection, so the brand felt current to each new generation.

Attach to cultural moments. The FIFA licence is the clearest example. By tying a limited-edition range to the World Cup season and a campaign built around self-expression, Skybags gave customers a reason to buy now rather than later.

Let design differentiate. Printed polycarbonate luggage, which Skybags says it was first to produce in India, gave it a visual identity in a category where most suitcases looked alike. Later, the brand added innovations such as lightweight luggage, which it debuted in 2024.

Pair a youth brand with mass distribution. Launched originally for hypermarkets with a high-volume strategy, Skybags was designed to be accessible. It benefits from VIP's wide distribution network across exclusive stores, multi-brand stores, large-format retail, defence canteens, and e-commerce.

A Second Brand That Rewrote the First

Skybags' story is a useful lesson for students of marketing. A company with an established name chose not to stretch it to a younger audience, but to create a separate brand with its own personality, price position, and ambassadors. It then invested in the category and cultural moments that mattered to that audience. The result, according to VIP's own founder, was a brand that matched its flagship in popularity within a few years.