For 17 years, Abhishek Ganguly helped build one of the biggest sportswear success stories in India.
When he joined Puma in 2005, he was the second employee in the country. The company did not even have an Indian entity, and its early team worked out of a Coffee World in Koramangala, Bengaluru, attracted partly by the free internet. Puma would eventually become one of the first single brands in fashion and sportswear to cross Rs 1,500 crore and then Rs 2,000 crore in revenue in India. Ganguly says it went on to become bigger than Nike and Adidas put together in the country.
Perhaps even more striking was the capital behind that growth. According to Ganguly, by 2023, Puma India had put in only around $20 million in equity capital to build a business generating roughly $400 million in revenue.
But when Ganguly decided to start Agilitas Sports, he realised that nearly two decades of experience could be as much a liability as an advantage.
“What got Puma to where it got will not get Agilitas even an inch ahead,” he told Amit Somani, Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, on the Prime Venture Partners Podcast.
Why India needs a different sportswear company
The idea behind Agilitas came partly from something Ganguly had noticed during his years working for a global sportswear company.
At Puma’s headquarters in Herzogenaurach, Germany, meeting rooms carried the names of cities including Barcelona, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Melbourne and Seoul.
“No New Delhi, no Bangalore,” he recalls.
Rather than viewing it as a complaint, Ganguly saw an opportunity. Despite the growth of the Indian market, India did not yet have what he calls a “pride of place” in global sportswear.
Countries such as the US and Germany had created global sports brands of their own. China had built its own brands too. Ganguly began asking a simple question: why not India?
That question would eventually become central to Agilitas.
“We always didn't want to be a brand for India. We wanted to be a brand from India,” he says.
The distinction matters. Ganguly does not want Agilitas to compete by positioning Indian products as cheaper alternatives to international brands. His ambition is to build products that can compete with the best globally on their own terms.
“This will compete with the best in the world,” he says of the company's products.
‘Consumers don’t need more brands’
Building that company, however, requires understanding how dramatically the Indian consumer has changed.
Two decades ago, Ganguly says, consumers were reluctant to spend Rs 5,000 to Rs 6,000 on a pair of shoes.
Today, sneaker culture has reached a point where he knows people in India who own as many as 400 pairs.
Retail has transformed alongside the consumer. India moved from limited offline retail to mono-brand stores, ecommerce and now quick commerce. Consumers who once struggled to access international brands can today choose from an enormous range of products.
That creates a very different problem for a company like Agilitas.
“Consumers don't need more products, they don't need more brands, they don't need more retail,” Ganguly says.
Availability alone is no longer differentiation. Neither is simply making another good shoe. Brands increasingly need to give consumers a reason to pay attention to them.
Ganguly borrows a framework from social media to explain how he thinks about this. Instagram, he says, taught brands that content first needs to be “scroll stopping” and then good enough to be shared.
“So there is a scroll stopping behavior and then you have to build which is shareable,” he says. “Scroll stopping means you got the attention, then you were good enough that people shared.”
For Agilitas, the challenge is therefore not simply making products. It is earning consideration in a market where consumers already have plenty of choices.
Why experience can become a founder’s biggest risk
Perhaps Ganguly's most counterintuitive belief about building Agilitas is that his previous success does not necessarily give the company an advantage.
It could do precisely the opposite.
“The biggest risk Agilitas has is because I have done this before,” he says.
His reasoning is that successful operators can become prisoners of their own pattern recognition. What worked previously starts looking like a template for what should work again. Confidence can turn into certainty, and certainty can reduce the willingness to learn.
“If you think you know it, you build ego and you're low on learning,” he says.
Ganguly has a phrase he says he reminds himself of every day: “Disruptors don't disrupt again.”
The lesson has become particularly relevant because of the speed at which Indian consumption is changing. Ganguly says his first two-and-a-half to three years building Agilitas have already taught him things that run counter to lessons from his previous 20 years in the industry.
Consumers are evolving too quickly, he argues, for history alone to provide the answers.
From Virat Kohli the ambassador to Virat Kohli the builder
One of the most visible manifestations of the Agilitas strategy is its relationship with Virat Kohli.
The relationship goes back to 2016, when Kohli was Indian cricket captain and coming off an extraordinary IPL season. Ganguly, then at Puma, proposed something different from the conventional celebrity endorsement model.
Rather than simply paying Kohli a fixed brand ambassador fee, he suggested building a brand that belonged to Kohli, which could collaborate with Puma through a royalty arrangement. That relationship eventually developed into One8.
Years later, when Ganguly was preparing to leave Puma, Kohli was among the first people he told.
Ganguly explained his ambition to create a sportswear company from India. The conversation returned to the same question behind Agilitas: “Why not us?”
“Why can't an Indian brand get to the podium of the Olympics?” Ganguly recalls them asking. Why could a brand from India not eventually become the preferred choice of athletes elsewhere in the world?
Kohli subsequently became one of Agilitas' early believers. Ganguly says the cricketer walked away from a large financial outlay from Puma, invested in Agilitas and merged his brand with the company.
His role, Ganguly insists, goes considerably beyond lending his name and face to the brand.
When the company was developing its first performance cricket shoe ahead of the IPL, Kohli personally tested the product and rejected 17 prototypes.
“He tested it like, like with schoolboy energy,” Ganguly says, describing Kohli as being involved in the smallest details of the product.
It is an example of what Agilitas wants the relationship to represent. Kohli is not merely the celebrity used to generate attention for a finished product. He is part of the process of building it.
Building something that eventually outgrows its founders
The long-term ambition is bigger than any individual associated with the company.
Ganguly recalls asking Kohli what success for One8 would look like 20 years from now. Kohli's answer surprised him.
Success, he said, would be when “nobody cares two hoots about who built this, who started this.”
For Ganguly, that reflected a “deep builder mindset”.
It also fits his own decision to start again.
Ganguly grew up, he says, in an India where success was often associated with certainty and stability. People were encouraged to find a path and eventually “settle down”. Over time, he discovered that the moments he enjoyed most came from moving away from what had already been built and attempting something that had not been done before.
“I want to stay unfinished till I can,” he says.
For someone who has already spent two decades building in Indian sportswear, Agilitas is therefore less about recreating the last journey than attempting an entirely different one.
And Ganguly's advice to entrepreneurs reflects that distinction.
“Always learn from others. The gateway of the world is through others, but never try to copy others,” he says.
(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)
Source: YourStory
