They Built India's First Outdoor Gear Brand in a Garage — The Wild and Wonderful Story of Wildcraft

In the hills and forests around Bengaluru, in an era when "outdoor adventure" was not a lifestyle category or a marketing opportunity but simply what a small group of passionate people did on weekends, an engineer named Dinesh K.S. was doing what he loved most: trekking, climbing, and pushing himself into the kind of terrain that most people preferred to look at from a distance.

On one of those outdoor excursions, Dinesh met with an accident.

It was the kind of incident that stops most people. The kind that makes ordinary risk feel real and immediate. But for Dinesh, the accident produced a different response entirely — not a retreat from the outdoors, but a recognition that the right equipment could have made a significant difference. That the gear available to Indian outdoor enthusiasts was either unavailable locally, prohibitively expensive to import, or simply not designed for India's specific terrain, climate, and users.

In the late 1990s, Dinesh and the small group of outdoor enthusiasts he moved with were sourcing most of their equipment from abroad. Tents, sleeping bags, rucksacks — the essential kit for any serious trekker — were either imported at significant cost or improvised from inadequate domestic alternatives. The Indian outdoor market, in any organised or branded sense, simply did not exist.

Dinesh decided to create it himself.

In 1998, working out of a small garage in Jayanagar, Bengaluru — a space that, from the outside, apparently resembled a doctor's clinic more than a manufacturing facility — he started Wildcraft. A team of seven or eight people designed, sourced, and sold products from that garage. Dinesh taught people outdoor skills, took them on expeditions, and came back in the evenings to sell gear from the small outlet attached to the workspace.

The first product was a dome tent. Small beginnings. Large ambitions.

A Fishing Camp, Two MBAs, and a Decision

The Wildcraft that Dinesh built in the late 1990s was not yet a commercial enterprise in any meaningful sense. For the first seven years, it was run as a hobby — a passion project sustained by love of the outdoors rather than business logic. The company took people on expeditions and manufactured some gear, but there was no structured growth strategy, no investment, and no full-time committed leadership driving commercial development.

The two people who would eventually change that arrived through a Cauvery fishing camp.

Gaurav Dublish and Siddharth Sood had studied management together at NMIMS in Mumbai and had come to Bengaluru for their first corporate jobs — Gaurav at Standard Chartered, Siddharth at GE. Over a weekend, they met Dinesh, who took them on a fishing camp by the Cauvery River. What they experienced in those days — the combination of genuine outdoor immersion, the camaraderie of the trail, and the absence of any quality Indian gear to make the experience more reliable — planted a seed.

They joined Wildcraft in 2000 in a part-time capacity, helping where they could while maintaining their corporate careers. For years, the arrangement worked as a parallel track — passionate involvement without full commitment.

Then came 2003. Dinesh joined the National Outdoor Leadership School in the United States as a field instructor, spending significant time abroad. Two other original partners resigned. The company faced an existential crisis — a founding team scattered, a business without direction, and no clear path forward.

Gaurav and Siddharth stepped in. And in 2007, they made the decision that changed everything: they left their careers at Standard Chartered and GE respectively, and committed to Wildcraft full time.

From Services to Products: The Pivot That Built a Brand

When Gaurav and Siddharth went full time in 2007, Wildcraft was still primarily a services business — taking people on outdoor expeditions and occasionally selling gear on the side. Products contributed only 20 to 25% of revenue. The services model had a fundamental problem: scaling it required certified outdoor instructors and guides, and finding qualified people in India was genuinely difficult.

The pivot was clear. Products could scale. Services, without the human infrastructure, could not.

The founders took a factory with ten employees and began manufacturing in earnest. The role-sharing that followed was almost perfectly matched to each person's temperament and skills. Dinesh — who continued trekking mountains above 6,000 metres regularly — became the product's most demanding and most credible tester. Every piece of gear that Wildcraft considered was tried in real conditions, in real terrain, by someone who needed it to work. Gaurav took marketing and sales. Siddharth focused on operations.

The first backpacks they made were basic. The feedback was immediate and specific. They iterated. They improved. They went back out into the field and tested again. Product development at Wildcraft was not a design exercise conducted in a studio. It was a field operation — guided by the experience of people who were genuinely using what they built.

The early blockbuster product was unexpected: a sleeping bag so well designed and so efficiently packable that IT companies in Bengaluru began ordering it in bulk — specifically because they needed sleeping bags for employees during the city's frequent bandh situations when staying overnight at the office became necessary. A product designed for mountain trekkers found a market in corporate Bengaluru. The company learned something important: good outdoor gear was also good urban gear, if the design was thoughtful enough.

The Growth That Made India's Outdoor Category

Between 2007 and 2014, Wildcraft's growth was driven by a product-first strategy that had no major precedent in Indian retail. The brand was building a category from scratch — not educating consumers about a product they already knew they wanted, but creating awareness of an entire lifestyle that Indian consumers had not yet fully named or claimed as their own.

The backpack became Wildcraft's flagship and most recognisable product. Functional, durable, designed for real use rather than appearance, and offered at price points that made quality accessible to Indian consumers who had previously faced the choice between cheap-but-unreliable domestic bags and expensive-but-excellent imported ones. Wildcraft offered a third option: Indian-made, internationally benchmarked, and priced for the Indian market.

In December 2013, Sequoia Capital India — now known as Peak XV Partners — invested in Wildcraft. The institutional backing validated what the founders had built and provided the capital to accelerate the retail and manufacturing expansion that followed. Myntra also became an investor, reflecting the growing recognition that Wildcraft's products were a natural fit for the online lifestyle commerce market.

A February 2018 Corporate Minority round and a July 2018 VC round followed, bringing total verified funding to approximately $20.1 million from investors including Peak XV Partners, FidelisWorld, and Myntra.

By FY2024, Wildcraft's revenue stood at ₹543 crore. The company operated over 200 exclusive stores and was present in more than 5,000 multi-brand retail outlets across India and international markets. Three manufacturing facilities — in Bengaluru and Himachal Pradesh — employed approximately 1,800 people directly. The team of seven in a Jayanagar garage had grown into one of India's most recognised consumer lifestyle brands.

The Marketing Strategy That Was Built on the Mountain, Not the Billboard

Wildcraft's rise to India's leading outdoor brand was not built on conventional advertising. It was built on a marketing philosophy that grew directly from how the founders thought about their own relationship with the outdoors.

The community that preceded the brand. Wildcraft did not build a community around its products. It built its products around a community that already existed. The outdoor enthusiasts, trekkers, and adventure seekers who gathered around Dinesh's expeditions in the late 1990s were not customers — they were co-creators of the brand's identity. When Wildcraft began manufacturing seriously in 2007, it was already embedded in the community it was building for. This pre-commercial community relationship gave Wildcraft a credibility that could not be purchased.

Real-world testing as the product promise. In a category where consumers are making purchasing decisions based on trust in product performance — sometimes in conditions where failure has real consequences — Wildcraft's practice of field-testing every product through Dinesh and other serious outdoor practitioners was itself a marketing statement. The message was not "this bag looks good." It was "this bag has been on a mountain above 6,000 metres and it worked." That distinction — between aesthetic claim and performance proof — was communicated through the brand's identity and its founders' visible outdoor credentials.

The backpack as the cultural gateway. Wildcraft's decision to make the backpack its flagship product was strategically significant. The backpack is not just an outdoor product. It is a daily-use, school-use, travel-use, lifestyle product — one of the most frequent and visible consumer goods in any young Indian's life. By making the best Indian-made backpack available at an accessible price, Wildcraft placed itself in front of millions of potential customers who were not necessarily outdoor enthusiasts but who recognised quality when they found it. The backpack brought urban India to an outdoor brand.

Physical retail as brand experience. Wildcraft's investment in exclusive brand stores — over 200 locations across India — created physical touchpoints where the brand's identity could be communicated through space and environment, not just product. In categories built on trust and product performance, the opportunity to touch, test, and try before buying is enormously valuable. The store network gave Wildcraft's largely urban, quality-conscious customer base that opportunity, and gave the brand a visibility that online presence alone could not have achieved.

The Indian athlete and adventurer as the ambassador. Rather than signing Bollywood celebrities or cricket stars, Wildcraft's brand communication has consistently centred on real outdoor enthusiasts, adventure athletes, and trekkers — people whose credibility in the outdoor space is earned through genuine experience rather than fame. This approach to brand association reinforces the core product promise: Wildcraft is made by people who go outdoors, for people who go outdoors.

India's Pioneering Outdoor Brand

Wildcraft is today what Dinesh set out to create from that Jayanagar garage — India's first and most recognised homegrown outdoor gear brand. Its backpacks, rainwear, trekking shoes, rucksacks, jackets, and travel accessories serve a community that spans serious mountaineers and casual weekend trekkers, school students and frequent fliers, city commuters and Himalayan expedition teams.

The accident on a mountain that inspired Dinesh in the late 1990s prompted a question: why couldn't India make the gear its outdoor enthusiasts needed? The answer he, Gaurav, and Siddharth spent three decades building is visible in every Wildcraft store, every factory in Bengaluru and Himachal Pradesh, and every backpack that climbs a mountain or commutes through a monsoon without failing.

India could make it. India just needed someone willing to build it from a garage, test it on a mountain, and refuse to stop until it worked.

That stubbornness — that love of the outdoors translated into the discipline of building — is the most Wildcraft thing about Wildcraft.

Founded 1998. Started in a garage in Jayanagar. Tested on mountains above 6,000 metres. ₹543 crore revenue. Still going further.