Factory reset: How Agilitas is building sportswear backwards
After turning Puma into India’s biggest sportswear business, Abhishek Ganguly is trying to build a sportswear company from the factory floor up, bringing manufacturing, licensed labels, owned brands, and retail into one company.
Before the Grand Slam finals, before the endorsements and magazine covers, there was a nineteen-year-old from Hyderabad who hit a forehand as if she meant to end the point right there. Sania Mirza would go on to become the world’s best doubles player. Long before that, Lotto had signed her.
By then, the Italian house, which began as a family business in Montebelluna, already had a long sporting history. Boris Becker had thundered through his Boom Boom years in its colours. Dino Zoff, Italy’s legendary goalkeeper and captain, had lifted the 1982 World Cup wearing Lotto shoes. In India, though, what people of a certain generation remember is Mirza’s forehand and the “double lozenge” logo moving with her across the baseline.
Then the crest slipped from view. It still surfaced in Wimbledon photo galleries, Serie A archives, and on South Africa’s jersey during the 2023 World Cup, if you were nerd enough to notice such things. Its last visible appearance in Indian professional sport came with Kochi Tuskers Kerala, the now-defunct IPL franchise that played just one season in 2011. SSIPL, the Delhi manufacturer that had operated Lotto in India for close to two decades through its own multi-brand stores, walked away from the brand in 2022.
In January this year, Lotto brought Mirza back. The brand called it a homecoming and gave her a mandate as chief advisor for women’s sport, with a say in product strategy. Cricketer Abhishek Sharma came on board the previous year as an investor and face of the brand when Lotto relaunched in India under its new operator, Agilitas Sports.
For 18 years, Abhishek Ganguly ran Puma in India and Southeast Asia, taking the business from Rs 20 crore to nearly Rs 4,000 crore, past Reebok, Nike, and Adidas. In 2023, he left Puma, with its finance chief Amit Prabhu and sales head Atul Bajaj following him out.
Agilitas, his latest act, is built differently. It owns manufacturing through Mochiko, licenses Lotto and, as The State of Play reported, the running label Hoka, and owns Virat Kohli’s One8. It also runs stores that can sell Agilitas labels in the same stores as Nike, Adidas, and other brands, a vertically integrated structure with little precedent in Indian sportswear. Having built his reputation in a market where global sportswear companies grew through athletes, advertising, and stores, Ganguly had no obvious reason to own factories. Agilitas does.
Through Mochiko, Agilitas now makes shoes in three factories across Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh, some destined for Lotto and One8, many still bound for Adidas and Puma. Lotto launched in India last July without a single store of its own and, Ganguly said, was already closing in on Rs 100 crore in revenue.
In a crowded sportswear market where the biggest names already move through shared Asian factories and similar glass-fronted stores, another product, brand, or store has to justify itself.
“The world doesn’t need more products, the world doesn’t need more brands, and the world doesn’t need more retail,” Ganguly told The State of Play in an interview. He calls the ambition audacious, then explains what he means. “At the end of it, we are not building a brand only,” he said. “We are building the entire ecosystem.”
In his telling, the factory can make a better product; the harder question is whether the brands and stores can make people want it. Agilitas is betting it can solve both problems at once.
