As an obese kid, Pallav Bihani was constantly body-shamed. But a tipping point came in 2013 when he had a slipped disc. The doctor told him, “If you want to avoid the surgery, you have to get fit.” And so, he pivoted into fitness, lost about 35-odd kilos and became a power fitness consumer. Along his journey, he saw certain gaps in the Indian fitness market and founded BoldFit in 2019 to serve the space.
Tell us about BoldFit and how it started.
I was a power consumer – eating, sleeping and drinking fitness. I even did keto when keto was not a thing back in 2013! But I saw a problem in the fitness industry. Products were either really expensive or really bad.
BoldFit started in 2019 with two yoga mats and today, we do five major categories in fitness – accessories, apparel, electronics, supports and nutrition and we’re building footwear in the coming future. We’re one of the largest fitness brands in almost every major marketplace and deliver one product every four seconds in some part of the country.
How do you manage to provide quality products at low prices?
In the initial days, brands would be paid for their R&D and technology. But today, you pay them big premiums for their marketing. It's not like they cannot give you quality products at a great price. It's just that they're slowly turning into luxury brands for a country like India, which is a very low capita income country.
What are some peculiarities of the Indian fitness customer?
Indian fitness consumers are highly aspirational, but they're cautious about how much they want to pay. They want the best products at the best price and they want it quick. The Indian customer is also aspirational with things that they relate to – their favourite teams, cricketers or actors. We've been positioning a lot of our marketing campaigns around that.
If you look at it in the broad sense, the penetration of fitness in India is around 0.2% of our overall population. By comparison, in China, that number stands at 10%. And in the US, it's about 19 to 20%. Indian customers get inspired by larger trends.
Over the last 10 years or so, the definition of a good physique in Bollywood has changed completely. Even with the Indian cricket team, men are really fit now compared to how they were in the early 2000s.
The pandemic was a great catalyst for the industry. It pushed a lot of people into fitness. But that was very momentary.
As a D2C brand, are you planning offline expansion in the near future?
We see a lot of opportunities digitally, even right now. A lot of tier-two and tier-three cities in India can be reached faster through e-commerce. People in these cities have a lot of disposable income but lack high quality, well-branded products. Offline means you cannot really reach them all. That's why the internet plays a very pivotal role. Having said that, we do have some plans to go offline as well. We'd like to build out about 100 of our own stores.
Why go offline?
Whether online or offline, there is a clear gap in the Indian fitness space that we’ve been able to crack by providing quality products at a great price. Having been present online for over five years, we've served over 12, 13 million customers. There is a demand that's been created for our products over the last five years. Now when we go offline, we won't be pushing our products, but rather catering to the pool that's there.
Considering the competition in markets, is there a reason BoldFit is still bootstrapped?
Throwing money and people at problems cannot really solve problems. I think if capital could make great brands, in the last three or four years, we would have seen multiple unicorns in the D2C space, which didn't happen. For us, it comes down to understanding who our customers are, what they want and solid execution of that. Capital can only aid it. When we were really in need of capital, a lot of the investors shut their doors. So we had no choice but to be bootstrapped. Now that the company has grown, and reached a certain scale, people have started knocking on our doors. So, that’s a great space to be in.
What is your vision for the future of the brand?
Every country has its own fitness brand. The US has Nike, Germany has Adidas and Japan has Yonex. What does our India have? It's largely dominated by foreign brands. We want to be that Indian fitness brand out of India.
