When Blissclub's new menswear page loaded this week, visitors encountered something unusual in the world of activewear marketing. No cricket heroes in mid-swing. No Bollywood abs glistening under studio lights. Instead: Vidit Aatrey, Arnav Kumar, and Chandan Mendiratta—the co-founder of Meesho, the co-founder of Leap, and Zepto's Chief Brand Officer—staring back from the hero section.
It's an odd pitch, deliberately so. And it caught the attention of the LinkedIn commentariat almost immediately.
The women's movewear brand, which has been steadily expanding since its 2020 launch, flipped its site navigation to include "Men New" sometime around February 12, when the iOS app quietly pushed version 3.3.3. The collection itself is straightforward: four anchor pieces priced between ₹1,500 and ₹3,000. The Legendary Pants. The Cloud Polo. The Legendary Jacket. The Cotton Pro Tee. Standard first-order discounts apply, stackable promos included.
What's not standard is the casting.
Credibility Transfer, or a Miscalculation?
One early LinkedIn post flagged the choice with mild admiration: "not a cricketer in sight." The landing page section—titled "Chosen by Industry Leaders"—displays image tiles of the three founders, though curiously, their names aren't labeled in text. You either know who these people are, or you don't. Blissclub seems willing to take that risk.
The underlying bet is less about selling fabric and more about selling affinity. Founder Minu Margeret and her team appear to believe that credibility in one domain—say, building a $5 billion commerce platform or scaling a quick-commerce unicorn—can bleed into another. Especially if your target customer is someone who follows startup Twitter more closely than IPL standings.
Whether that hypothesis holds is another question entirely. Athleisure marketing has traditionally leaned hard on athletic aspiration: wear what the champions wear. Blissclub is inverting that. Wear what the operators wear. It's either clever or it's not going to work at all. The first few weeks of sales data will tell.
What's Actually for Sale
The product copy echoes Blissclub's established women's line: fabric, fit, function. The brand claims the collection is "designed for the Indian man's body" with attention "down to the last stitch"—the kind of language that could mean everything or nothing, depending on execution.
The Legendary Pants come in three lengths, a nod to the fit variation issues Blissclub has hammered home in its women's offerings. Color names, perhaps inevitably, tie back to the founders: Mayank Maroon, Winay White, Bilal Blue on the polo; Bhanu Beige, Nitish Navy, Gaurav Grey on the jacket. It's an internal wink that may or may not register with customers.
Early reviews? Sparse, as you'd expect for a launch less than a week old. One product shows a 5.0 rating from a single review. Most display nothing. The site promises free returns and exchanges within 14 days—standard D2C armor against buyer's remorse.
The Expansion Arc
Blissclub didn't start with men in mind. The company launched in 2020 as a women's movement-first brand, anchored by Margeret's vision for movewear that didn't feel like an afterthought. The business raised $15 million in Series A funding in May 2022 from Eight Roads Ventures and Elevation Capital, then pulled in another ₹33 crore in May 2025, again led by Elevation. FY24 revenue reportedly landed around ₹92.16 crore, according to trade press—a respectable if not explosive figure.
The menswear launch follows a rapid-fire series of category expansions. Travelwear in April 2025. Swimwear in May 2025. A new PetalRib collection in January 2026. The brand now operates 17-plus stores across seven cities; the 16th opened in Gurugram last May. Its women's line is available on Myntra and Amazon, though whether the men's SKUs will hit those platforms immediately remains unclear.
Timing the Market
India's athleisure sector has been on a tear, and Blissclub's entry into men's comes at a moment when the category has real momentum. Puma India leads sportswear revenue. Uniqlo has set a ₹3,000 crore target for India over the next three years. Closer to Blissclub's positioning, XYXX crossed ₹131 crore in FY24 and is pushing hard from innerwear into athleisure territory. Technosport has announced plans for a ₹200 crore expansion with 300 exclusive outlets.
Post-pandemic comfort shifts haven't reversed. They've calcified. Blissclub's November 2025 "Bliss Police" campaign leaned into that—comfort over aesthetics, function over flash. If that positioning can translate across gender lines (and there's no obvious reason it shouldn't), the brand might have a lane.
But the founder-as-model strategy remains the wildcard here.
The Open Question
Activewear has always sold aspiration. The question Blissclub is testing is whether that aspiration has to be physical. Can a Meesho co-founder move product the way a Virat Kohli does? Maybe, if the audience overlap is strong enough. Maybe, if the brand has built enough trust to experiment. Maybe not at all.
The answer will likely arrive in increments. Early sell-through rates. Repeat purchase data. Whether those LinkedIn posts translate into actual conversions, or just momentary engagement. Blissclub is betting that in 2026, credibility is fungible—that success in one arena can lend authority in another, especially when the customer base skews toward those who've heard of Zepto's Chief Brand Officer in the first place.
It's an unconventional play. Which is either exactly the point, or a miscalculation they'll course-correct in six months. Time, as always, will clarify.
