‘Why not us?’ Inside the making and remaking of Virat Kohli’s One8
Once just another name on a Puma tag, One8 is now Virat Kohli’s equity bet with Agilitas’ Abhishek Ganguly: a homegrown sportswear label that aims to compete with the logos Indian kids grew up chasing.
On a sticky Tuesday in Birmingham, Jos Buttler walked out for his 200th one-day international in a pair of spikes that did not owe him anything.
Teal bleeding into white across the upper. Two gold rings locked into a figure eight on the side. “one8” stitched on the tongue. Metal flashing underfoot as he marked his guard.
Fourteen balls later, he flicked one from Prasidh Krishna, found only a leading edge, and watched Gurnoor Brar hold the catch as he collided with Shubman Gill. Virat Kohli, steering India’s chase of England’s 258, finished with the same score. The numbers will disappear into a database. The teal-and-white spikes might not.
Buttler is only one pair of feet. The same pattern keeps turning up. Jacob Bethell, opening for England that afternoon, laced them on. Jordan Cox, another England international and Kohli’s team-mate at Royal Challengers Bengaluru, trusts them too. Rashid Khan wore that teal-and-white while bowling for Gujarat Titans this IPL. No contracts. No fees. Just players opening the same box.
The day before Buttler’s landmark at Edgbaston, a few hundred miles south at Lord’s, Smriti Mandhana walked off to a standing ovation. India had just won the first women’s Test there by 270 runs. Three months earlier, she had put her name to One8. Venkatesh Iyer, another of Kohli’s colleagues from RCB, joined the roster last week. Rajat Patidar, Jitesh Sharma and Devdutt Padikkal, who bat either side of Kohli on RCB duty, were already in the room.
Kohli turned up in design rooms before there was a calendar, pressing thumbprints into foam, pushing back on panels, asking how the upper would hold on cracked red-soil pitches in India.
“For athletes, the most important thing is wearing the right shoe so that stress is completely gone from your mind,” he said at last month's One8 launch event in New Delhi. “If you are thinking about your feet on the field, your focus isn’t on your skill.”
He sent back the first prototypes. And the second. He rejected the early versions seventeen times. Only on the eighteenth, which Agilitas executives insist was purely coincidental, did the team find a heel-locking mechanism and a feel underfoot he trusted when he turned hard on grass.
The first finished shoe went to the coach who used to bark at his front knee in West Delhi; everyone else got theirs after him.
Behind that shoe is Agilitas, a three-year-old sportswear company he owns a slice of, led by a chief executive he chose, Abhishek Ganguly, and structured on terms he argued for after walking away from a long Puma deal. No logo rental. No passive royalty cheque. A stake, a say, and a product that has to survive on feel rather than on a signature.
In Kohli’s own words, this is meant to be a brand that, in twenty years, “no one will give two hoots about who we are, who started this, and honestly, a brand that must outgrow all of us,” he told the room at the launch. “I’d love to be forgotten completely, for this to take over.”
Kohli had been talking about a brand that outgrows him long before the logo ever went on a box. The first attempt to build it dates back to 2015, two years before One8 existed and long before Agilitas had a company to house it. That version stayed trapped in slides. What went on sale last month is the first time the plan has left the building.
