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PR Playbook · D2C pop-culture apparel and merchandise
How The Souled Store turned licensing and community into a media engine
The Souled Store treats each licensing deal as a scheduled media moment for a ready-made fandom, and pairs it with a deliberately conversational brand voice. More than 200 global properties and a self-amplifying community generate a steady drumbeat of coverage without conventional advertising.
Founded 2013 by Vedang Patel and co-founders, Mumbai
How did The Souled Store grow without conventional advertising?
The Souled Store treats each licensing deal as a scheduled media moment for a ready-made fandom, and pairs it with a deliberately conversational brand voice. More than 200 global properties and a self-amplifying community generate a steady drumbeat of coverage without conventional advertising.
- FY25 revenue, up 37%
- ₹492 Cr
- licensed global properties
- 200+
- total funding
- $24M+
FY25 revenue, up 37%
licensed global properties
total funding
Figures are the company's own reported numbers, drawn from the sources below.
The context
The problem to solve
Fan merchandise in India was long a grey market of unlicensed prints and inconsistent quality. The Souled Store's opportunity was to become the official, trusted home of pop culture.
But licences alone do not build a brand. The challenge was to turn a catalogue of characters into a fandom community, and to make each new partnership an event the press and social feeds wanted to amplify.
The approach
How they earned attention
The engine is licensing as a newsroom. The brand holds rights to more than 200 global properties, from Marvel and DC to anime and K-pop, and treats each collaboration as a scheduled media moment aimed at a passionate, ready-made audience.
By investing in hard-to-access licences where fan intensity is highest, it manufactures a steady drumbeat of drops that generate organic coverage and social buzz without conventional advertising.
Underneath the licences is a deliberate brand-voice decision. As co-founder Vedang Patel puts it, the tone is conversational, not aspirational, which was foundational to building a large, self-amplifying digital fandom that shares and defends the brand.
“We are building the home of pop culture. Our brand voice isn't aspirational, it's conversational.”
Vedang Patel, Co-founder and CEO
The results
What it added up to
Operating revenue grew 37 percent to ₹492.4 crore in FY25, up from ₹360.2 crore in FY24, having turned profitable in FY24.
Net profit moderated to ₹11 crore in FY25 as taxes and costs rose, a profitable-but-investing posture rather than distress. The company has raised more than 24 million dollars from investors including Elevation Capital and RPSG Capital Ventures, and has signalled IPO ambitions.
The takeaway for communicators
What we take from it
A pipeline of partnership announcements, paired with a genuinely conversational brand voice, can turn an engaged fan community into a self-sustaining earned-media channel.
Sources
Every figure and quotation above is drawn from these published sources.
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