The underwear made for India’s sporting itch
Coimbatore-based TRYB is building men’s sports innerwear without patents or a pitch deck. It is asking men to spend on a discomfort they have mostly learned to keep private.
Tiruppur, Tamil Nadu’s knitwear capital, has long known fabric before brands. Cotton dust hangs in the air, and export floors hum to clocks set elsewhere. Inside, the work moves quickly across cutting tables, stitching lines and packing floors. A garment leaves town with another company’s label, often with another country’s customer in mind.
Sridharan Jayabal and Vikranth Reddy came from that world. Jayabal’s family had built Crystal and Solo, South Indian innerwear brands that once competed with Rupa and Lux Cozi. Reddy had spent years making clothes for export labels, including merchandise for NBA and NFL teams, watching as better yarns and tighter checks left India in cartons, then came back to Indian consumers as “global quality.”
They knew each other through work in Tiruppur, then became friends at a gym, and later in mixed martial arts classes. Sometime in the mid-2000s, while a television played above the equipment, they noticed a cricketer taking guard and tugging at his abdominal protector between deliveries.
Reddy and Jayabal laughed first, then watched more closely. Was it sweat? Was it fit? Was the guard itself moving? Neither knew. Both knew cloth. “We just realised, ‘If this is an itch, why can’t we think of a way to solve it?’” Reddy told The State of Play. “Because there is technology to do it. We’re already shipping large volumes of quality products. Why not this?”
TRYB began with underwear, the garment men already wore into sport, and a problem many had learned to ignore. In India, that problem showed up in gyms, on bikes, on runs and back on cricket grounds, through sweat, shifting guards, damp cotton and the awkward silence around it all. To Reddy, the country had regular innerwear and sportswear, but almost nothing made for the first layer men wear while moving.
It took years for the idea to become a company. Performance Apparel Enterprises Private Limited, the company behind TRYB, was incorporated on August 10, 2022, with Jayabal and Reddy listed as directors. At launch, TRYB called itself “India’s first sports innerwear” brand. Reddy now describes the customer more broadly.
“It could be anyone in their 30s or 40s trying to get back to their college sport, now that their kids are growing up,” he said. “It could be marathon runners, somebody training for Hyrox, someone playing pickleball or padel, a school kid getting into sport for the first time, or a 60- or 70-year-old man getting back to walking.”
