It’s Thursday, and today we’re covering Slikk Club,, an Indian quick‑fashion startup founded by Akshay Gulati, Om Prakash Swami, and Bipin Singh. The company just  raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed India Partners, with participation from Multiply Ventures and several angel investors. 

We’re diving back into India’s quick‑commerce space—this time, it’s fashion (you can read my earlier pieces on KiranaPro  here and Snabbit  here).

Slikk sells fashion items and delivers them in 60 minutes. Now, selling clothes online is about as basic as it gets—but selling and delivering them in an hour, with instant returns—that’s ambitious.

From a customer’s perspective, it sounds like a dream. Normally, buying clothes online is quick: open the app, pick what you like, pay. But then comes the wait—3 to 5 days for delivery. If something doesn’t fit, you pack it up, take it to the post office or wherever else you might go to that, and wait again for the return to process and your refund to arrive. All in, it can take two weeks from placing the order to getting your money back.

That kind of speed and convenience completely rewires customer expectations—but it also puts pressure on what Slikk has to offer.

And what Slikk offers is thousands of items across 80 brands. Through the app or website you’ll find everything from hoodies to sunglasses, and the team plans plenty of category expansion. Right now the focus is Western styles, but ethnic wear is on the roadmap, along with luggage and beauty.

The catalog itself isn’t that unusual. Delivery is where things get interesting.

Outside Bangalore, Slikk behaves like a regular online store with standard shipping and refund times. Inside Bangalore you can use Try  &  Buy: 

It feels less like you’re going to a store and more like the store is coming to you.

Yes, quick commerce lives and dies on logistics, but that’s not what really sets Slikk apart. The more interesting piece is its relationships with brands—and the effects of those partnerships.

Why do brands need Slikk? The obvious answer: another distribution channel.

But one big upside for brands is that they’re seeing 2-3x higher stock turns—that’s how often a company sells and replaces its inventory over a specific period. In traditional channels, a brand might see 50-60% stock turn; on Slikk, it’s 80-90%. And that’s good news for several reasons:

Another part of the brand equation is who gets featured on the platform. Slikk works mostly with unknown, digital-native brands. That unlocks a few advantages. First, more negotiating power—it’s tough for an unknown brand to impose terms. Second, smaller brands tend to have shorter value chains, meaning fewer middlemen and potentially higher margins.

Finally, Slikk makes money on every sale. Plus, the Try & Buy option is a paid feature—₹50, or about $0.50.

India’s apparel market is growing—as is every other market in the country. It’s projected to expand from $93B to $200B by 2030. E-commerce’s share is expected to rise from 14-15% to 20%. But those numbers are kind of bland.

There are two things that I think are more noteworthy.

First, there’s a wave of international brands preparing to launch in India. That signals market maturity: foreign companies believe they can hit sustainable revenue with the country’s growing consumer base.

Second, the shift to organized retail. Back in 2018, unorganized retail made up 72% of apparel sales. By 2021, it dropped to 65%, and it’s projected to fall further to 52% by 2027. The transition from mom-and-pop shops to branded stores and e-commerce is well underway.

Indian apparel market is unique for two reasons:

This makes assortment harder—more customer types to serve—but also more flexible. You can pivot between categories and still target the same market size, just different eyeballs.

I think a lot of Slikk’s thesis relies on compulsive buying—and we do have some evidence that it’s more prevalent among Indians than other populations. One study showed that India leads Asia in the number of people with impulse control disorders, with impulsive buying being one of the most common manifestations. Another study found Indians to be more inclined to impulse buy compared to the French.

A study by BCG and Snap found that among India’s Gen Z—a key part of Slikk’s target audience—the vast majority enjoy changing their clothing and appearance. If we assume similar tendencies among millennials, that would also suggest a strong propensity toward impulse purchases.

With food—we all understand. You can run out of something and need or want that item now, be it chili sauce, spaghetti, or cabbage. You’ve been there, and I was literally there yesterday when I was writing this. And food is something we need to survive. Do we need fancy clothing to survive? Human history suggests probably not. So the question is: how many people need clothing in 60 minutes compared to food?

The company mentions that people are buying shirts on Slikk and wearing them to work that same day. And that’s either now typical behavior for an Indian consumer who can get anything quickly (which would be great), or a small segment of a much larger market (which wouldn’t be so great).

Return rates in apparel are between 25–40%. Slikk is at 20%, which honestly blows my mind how low they are. However, that’s still a 20% revenue loss due to returns, which in grocery, I would guess, is just a couple of percentage points. Slikk bears delivery costs regardless of whether a customer paid for the whole order or returned part of it.

Scaling quick commerce to smaller cities is a challenge because to reach profitability, you need order frequency and density. That’s easier to do in a city of 10 million than in a city of 1 million. But I think this challenge is even more pronounced in fashion, where it’s not just about frequency and density, but also about who lives in a particular neighborhood.

You can have two neighborhoods with similar income. Both order groceries online. But one is populated mostly by families, the other—by yuppies. The latter is much more likely to buy clothing to be delivered in 60 minutes. Slikk deliberately placed its first dark store near younger shoppers. Which is smart, but also shows that there’s a risk this model isn’t as scalable as traditional quick commerce.

I think there’s a lot of value in Slikk’s model and fashion focus in general. They can both adjust to consumer needs—because the SKU supply is practically infinite—and have enough control over brands, since those brands are unknown. If certain items get better traction or consumer tastes shift, they can adjust the assortment. If they don’t like working with a certain brand, they can replace it. And that’s even before getting into private label talk.

We can’t ignore the middle class growth. Tens of millions of people are entering the middle class every year. With that comes a shift in consumer spending habits—from necessities to discretionary spending. That’s a very long-term shift, but a vital one. Also, the Indian consumer class is young—the exact people you want if you’re in fashion and building an innovative business model.

I don’t know what takes up less space in a dark store—one item of clothing or one food item. What I do know is that an average clothing item costs more than an average food item. Meaning: you have to sell fewer clothing items than food items to make the same revenue. Which means, to reach profitability, you need to move less volume if you’re in fashion than if you’re in groceries.

In an interview, Slikk’s co-founder and CEO, Akshay Gulati, said Indians have become spoiled with convenience and demand quality service. And that’s hard to argue with. If you live in a Tier-1 city, you can practically get anything you want in 60 minutes or less. We get used to good things—fast.

Fifteen years ago, practically no one had a 4G connection. Today, we’re very annoyed when we don’t have quality internet—regardless of where we are.

That’s what makes this fascinating. In my mind, you don’t need your clothing in an hour. But that’s because my base expectation is that I get my groceries and household goods in an hour—not everything.

But if you’re in a Tier-1 Indian city, you probably already expect your groceries, electronics, and maids to arrive within an hour. So why not clothing?