We’ve all struggled to find a perfect place for customizable merchandise for clubs, associations, and societies during our college days. Even today, it is challenging to track down a space that offers bulk quality apparel at a budget.
The same struggled was faced by the QuadB team, the then students of PEC Chandigarh. A thought popped up their heads, finding out they were not the only dissatisfied people facing the apparel issues. That’s where it all started.
The Beginning
Bandhul, the co-founder at QuadB, had recently won the ‘ICICI Trinity’– a business planning competition and was already looking for ideas to develop on. He approached Litesh, the co-founder of QuadB and an Industrial Production engineer, hailing from Ludhiana, the city famed for its industrial prowess, who was aware of the technicalities and manufacturing processes adequately and commenced their startup– QuadB.
Initially, QuadB was a wholly bootstrapped startup fulfilling orders for all quantities. To scale up, they required capital. The team managed to crowdfund around Rs 20 lakh with the help of a seed fund from their family and friends that helped them expand their business, and eventually paid off their debt.
Litesh said,
“It started off with making t-shirts for our friends and peers, and word-of-mouth lead us to garner enough credibility to cater to the Colleges/Universities in and around Chandigarh. And thus, we finally registered QuadB in 2015 with the aim of providing people with high-quality apparel that was both affordable and customizable.”
India’s first 100% customizable apparel brand
QuadB is India’s first 100% customizable apparel brand that focusses on delivering premium quality products to people. The idea that initially started as a personalized solution for their problems eventually ended up being a brand that has been revolutionizing the industry since 2014. QuadB design manufacture and deliver high-quality apparel to a customer base spread across India.
Their products range from regular single-day budget T-shirts starting from Rs 80 to premium corporate apparel that can cost up to Rs 1,500.
Their core team consists of Litesh, Bandhul, Vinayak, Rupin, Nishant, and Sahil, each member playing a significant role in formulating the perfect blend of QuadB as a business. The firm is continuously building relations with its customer base to ensure their satisfaction with the end product and has also expanded to 6 offices in cities all over India- Chandigarh, Mohali, Ludhiana, Delhi, Kochi, Ahmedabad.
QuadB has worked for industry majors like UberEats, L’Oreal, Google, Microsoft, JP Morgans, Amazon, Swiggy, and Adobe, to SME’s in every city of northern India. Their firm has a stronghold over college students and has covered every top engineering and medical college all over India. The apparel firm has established a strong network among business owners of Tier II and Tier III in the past four years and has provided end to end solution to launch one’s own business apparel brand.
Building a budget manufacturing plant
Emanating from engineering backgrounds, the team was able to put forth a manufacturing plant worth Rs 20 crore in a cost-effective budget of Rs 1 crore with the use of modern techniques of JIT and VAL. JIT is a technology that is used exclusively in Japan, but because of QuadB’s production engineering background, they were able to build the components of the machinery on their own, including the JIGs and mixtures.
In its first year of functioning, QuadB managed to generate a revenue of Rs 7 lakh. By 2018, the company was able to multiply its revenue growth with all the hard work and created revenue of Rs 3 crore for 2018, 5 times the revenue for 2017. To date, they have fulfilled 13,000 orders and have expanded to 100 cities, 20 states, and five countries already.
On being asked about the company’s future plans, QuadB told TimesNext,
“Our future plans include expansion internationally and franchise building. Our short term goal is to increase our annual revenue from Rs 3 crore in 2018 to Rs 25 crore in 2020, which will aid us in our future endeavors. We’re also planning to build franchises all around India during the next couple of years, which is while we’re keeping an eye on having an IPO in the next 5 years. We’re also expanding internationally, and aim to grab a major chunk of the market share of custom apparel industries in the USA soon. We also hope to give back to the community in any way we can and plan to launch some more brands down-the-line.”
