Wildcraft Brand Guidelines: The Bengaluru Outdoor Gear Maker That Began in a Garage

A climber who made the gear he could not buy.

Wildcraft is an outdoor gear, clothing and footwear company based in Bengaluru. Its roots lie with Dinesh K.S., an engineer given to rock climbing and mountaineering who, The Hindu BusinessLine reported in June 2011, left a job at an electronics company and began making the outdoor gear he could not find locally. Accounts of the start date differ: Outlook Business wrote in April 2015 that Dinesh and a group of friends set the company up in Bengaluru in 1992, while Entrepreneur India wrote in July 2016 that he started it as a services company out of a garage in 1998. English Wikipedia gives 1998 as the founding year.

The earliest product, according to BusinessLine, was a dome tent, made more as a test of the market than for sale; the company soon turned to backpacks, which everyone in the outdoors needed. Using outsourced manufacturing, it made backpacks, sleeping bags and a modest range of outdoor clothing, sold imported climbing hardware, and ran a services wing for outdoor activities and management programmes. A small garage served as office and shop; English Wikipedia places it in Jayanagar, in south Bengaluru. As software companies filled the city, demand for laptop bags and daypacks gave the business a larger product line alongside its outdoor gear, the paper reported.

The company then went through a change of management. Dinesh became an instructor with the US-based National Outdoor Leadership School, splitting his time between India and the United States, and two of the three original partners later left, BusinessLine reported. Gaurav Dublish and Siddharth Sood, management graduates who had worked for Standard Chartered and GE respectively, invested and joined Dinesh as directors. Entrepreneur India says the three converged in Bangalore over six months in 2007 and decided that Wildcraft would be a product company, with Dinesh testing products, Dublish handling marketing and sales, and Sood running operations.

From services to products, and from outsourcing to its own factories.

The move to products reshaped the business. BusinessLine reported in 2011 that the services wing had been shut down and that Wildcraft now had its own factories, one in Bangalore and one in Himachal Pradesh; Dinesh told the paper that the company was trying to become a big brand selling a wide range of products rooted in the outdoors. By April 2015 Outlook Business counted three plants, two in Karnataka and one in Himachal Pradesh, employing nearly 1,800 people, and wrote that backpacks and rucksacks were the core of a range that also included tents, jackets, adventure gear and accessories.

Design was brought in-house as the company grew. Entrepreneur India reported in 2016 that after 2007 the company began hiring designers, many of them from the National Institute of Fashion Technology and the National Institute of Design, and that it had about 40 designers by then. Sood told the magazine that a backpack made for another market could not simply be copied for India because Indian body sizes and torso lengths differ, and that the company had trained its own design talent because no Indian rucksack trade existed to hire from. Dublish made a similar point to Outlook Business, saying products had to be designed around Indian body structures and the terrain where they would be used.

The range widened from packs. English Wikipedia says Wildcraft moved into technical clothing in 2015, footwear in 2017 and a line of travel cases in 2019, and Entrepreneur India described the business in 2016 as organised around three categories: gear, apparel and footwear.

Indian outdoor and accessory brands and their owners.

Indian footwear, bag and accessory brands tend to present themselves through names more than through pictures. A single company often runs several labels at once, each with its own logo, catalogue and shop page, so that a rubber slipper, a sports shoe and a formal shoe can reach different buyers while sharing factories and distributors. On company websites the parent name usually sits in the footer and the investor pages, while the sub-brand names lead on the shelf.

Shopfronts carry much of that identity. Many of these companies sell through a mix of exclusive showrooms, franchised stores, multi-brand dealers and online marketplaces, and their own pages count those outlets and list the cities and states they reach. Some names are above all store names: Metro Brands runs Metro Shoes and Mochi as separate store banners.

Group ownership is part of the picture. Fastrack belongs to Titan Company, the watch and accessories business, and Woodland is the outdoor brand of the Delhi company Aero Club. Others, such as Relaxo, Liberty, Campus and Khadim’s, are listed companies whose corporate pages describe their founders, their factories and their share listings on the National Stock Exchange of India and BSE.

Advertising often leans on film actors, named in dated campaigns reported by the trade press, and on dated catalogues for each range. For a designer, the useful material is the documented part: the names, the store formats, the founding dates and the factories. The palettes and type in these guides are unofficial interpretations, and no logo or product is reproduced.

From one city to stores across India and the Gulf.

Retail followed manufacturing. As of June 2011 BusinessLine counted 34 branded Wildcraft showrooms in India, 12 of them franchised, with its top showrooms in Jayanagar in Bangalore, Noida, Kochi, Chandigarh and Vashi in Navi Mumbai. Entrepreneur India reported in July 2016 that the brand had been sold only in Bangalore from 2007 to 2010, entered Delhi and Mumbai in 2010 and Kolkata in 2013, and had 140 stores in 65 cities, 110 of them run by the company; it also sold online through its own site and through Flipkart and Myntra. Outlook Business had counted 120 exclusive stores in 55 cities a year earlier.

Up to 2016 the company had raised one equity round, Entrepreneur India reported: Sequoia Capital invested in Wildcraft in September 2013, while Outlook Business dated the investment to December 2013 and described it as a 20 per cent stake. English Wikipedia describes the company today as Wildcraft India Ltd., formerly Wildcraft India Private Limited, still headquartered in Bengaluru and privately held.

The brand has also moved abroad through partners. In May 2024 Apparel Resources reported that Wildcraft India and the Dubai-based retailer Apparel Group had announced a partnership to sell the brand in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, through shop-in-shop counters in other retailers and on online platforms.

For a design guide, Wildcraft shows how an outdoor brand built on one product, the backpack, can carry a single name across clothing, footwear and luggage while keeping its outdoor origin at the centre of its story. Compare Woodland, another Indian outdoor footwear and clothing name, and Fastrack, the Bengaluru accessories brand that also sells bags. For this guide we use a forest green, a bark brown and an ochre with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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