Building India's most viral sneaker brand | Utkarsh Gupta | Unstarted

What do you do when the resume is perfect but the work isn't yours yet?
Utkarsh Gupta grew up in the Dainik Jagran family in Kanpur, a thirty-person joint family, a media legacy, and a grandfather who once left an entire newspaper page blank during the Emergency and went to jail for it. 

By thirty-two, Utkarsh had built his own answer: Comet, the Indian sneaker brand that put a mango shoe and a rubber-ducky shoe into the world before it ever touched a marketplace.

In this episode, Avnish Bajaj and Utkarsh sit with the questions most founders never say out loud:

Was the MBA real, or was I procrastinating? 

1. How do you build your own legacy when one's already been handed to you? 

2. How do you tell persistence apart from stubbornness when the first launch sells two pairs? 

3. When everyone says list on Myntra, why wait two and a half years?

A masterclass in brand building, told as a confession.

Chapters

0:00 Introduction
0:50 Growing up in Kanpur's joint family
1:13 How Dainik Jagran started on a cycle in 1940
2:09 Why he left a media dynasty to build his own thing
4:47 Doon School changed everything at age 11
6:20 Grandfather's lesson: don't be afraid to scale
11:50 How Chicago's sneaker culture sparked Comet
13:31 Creating your own surface area of luck
14:55 Finding co-founder Dushyant
23:24 The 4-pillar brand strategy that built Comet
27:09 Why they waited 2.5 years before joining Myntra
28:55 The Mango shoe sold 2 units in 4 days — they persisted anyway
31:40 3 metrics every founder should track
41:46 Building the sole from scratch (4-5 moulds, 6 months)
43:02 Creasing problem: sourced a secret material from Korea
46:12 Instagram → Stores → Myntra: the distribution sequence
49:43 Exclusive reveal: the Rubber Ducky drop (May)