LDU offers ethnic women's apparel for the Indian body type

The Indian textile and apparel market was valued at $172.3 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $387.3 billion by 2028 with a CAGR of 14.59%. The industry creates approximately 7800 kilotons of textile waste annually out of which 42% is accumulated from post-consumer waste such as factory waste and offcuts.

Apart from the exorbitant amounts of waste piled up by the industry, it also fails to cater to the plus size consumers without having to pay fat tax. Most of the designs made by major fashion companies fail to fit the Indian body.

Duo Dr. Drishti Anand and Aditya Balani setup LetsDressUp in 2019 aiming to find a solution to both these prevent issues. LDU is a fashion-tech company offering over 1000 clothing products. The company came up with its own size chart derived from the data collected after measuring over 3000 Indian women. The size chart has a number of sizes ranging from XS to 8XL.

Offering mainly ethnic clothing pieces like kaftans, palazzos and kurtis. LDU has in-house designers who curate the pieces, and the products are manufactured in factories in India from small and medium scale manufacturers.  

A majority of the fashion waste is created due to mass production but failure of the product to run that course. To avoid these large amounts of fashion waste, the company manufactures clothes in small batches. Another step taken by the platform is curation of pieces that are highly searched on the internet; this avoids putting in designs that are not liked by the customers.

Co-founder Balani told Entrackr, “I think building a model which is strongly pivoted around listening to users is something that we're trying to build rather than enforcing something that the designers feels that the world should be wearing.”

In an effort to ensure that the users have various dressing options, LDU recently started ‘Blockbuster Friday’. New fashion products are launched every Friday opposing the seasonal clothing lines that most brands release every year.

The Gurugram based company raised its seed round collecting a total of Rs 2 crore from Titan Capital, and marquee angels such as Sweta Rao, and senior partners from McKinsey India, and Kearney.

The platform sees around 8000 orders on a month basis with approximately a 25% retention rate. It also claims to have a 50% month on month growth rate.  

The company currently has a revenue of Rs 10 crore and aims on reaching the Rs 100 crore mark by the next 12-15 months. This growth comes with a gross profit margin of around 75% and looks at being EBITDA positive in the coming months.

Currently available only pan India, 90% of the sales come from the company website. The remaining is seen from online marketplaces, like Amazon. The company is soon to be live on online fashion platforms like Ajio and Myntra.