The Thrasio reset: How a Gurugram consumer durables startup scaled the ₹1,000 crore peak

“I went to Domino’s to eat and saw the Lifelong store. I went in just to check it out,” said Dua, 32. “I don’t have much space at home and I wasn’t sure about getting a treadmill. The Lifelong store staff suggested I look at a foldable one that came for ₹24,000. They installed it in my flat the same day, and I have been using it regularly.”

Since then, a friend bought the same gear on her recommendation and Dua has picked up other Lifelong products, including a duffel bag, a power bank and a pressure cooker.

A few months before Dua’s purchase, Delhi-based advertising executive Kritika Sharda bought a ₹1,599 Lifelong power bank on quick commerce platform Blinkit on the eve of a trip to Manali. “I am very impulsive, both in travel and in buying,” said the 28-year-old. “If I need something just before a trip, I prefer Blinkit. It’s fast, and even returns are quick.”

More recently, Gurugram-based banking professional Vishal Tulsiyan bought a ₹11,000 Lifelong air purifier on ecommerce site Amazon. “I was particular about getting an air purifier with more than 300 sq. ft range. I looked at the reviews and ratings on Amazon to zero in on Lifelong,” said Tulsiyan, adding that other brands priced over ₹20,000 did not offer the coverage that he was looking for. He ended up buying one more Lifelong air purifier a week later.

Taken together, these purchases—a store walk-in, a quick commerce impulse buy, and a considered marketplace purchase—offer a snapshot of a shift that is still underway for Lifelong.

From the outside, Gurugram-based Lifelong’s decade-old story looks familiar. Like many new-age consumer brands, it built its business online, selling across marketplaces such as Amazon and Flipkart and, more recently, quick commerce platforms such as Instamart, Blinkit and Zepto. It has scaled rapidly across categories including fitness equipment, kitchen appliances, grooming products and consumer electronics, crossing the ₹1,000 crore revenue mark this fiscal, according to the company, while also turning profitable. In 2024-25, Lifelong reported revenue of over ₹540 crore and a net loss of ₹36 crore. The company declined to share the extent of its profit this fiscal.

But the shape of that growth is now changing. The company is expanding across three channels at once. While ecommerce continues to drive scale, quick commerce is growing rapidly but requires tighter control over supply chains and inventory. Offline retail, started for building trust, is now generating meaningful sales and demands a different kind of execution.

Alongside this, Lifelong has expanded its product portfolio to over 450 offerings, scaled its manufacturing base, and begun repositioning itself as a more premium, innovation-driven brand.

Each of these moves adds a new layer of execution. Together, they begin to change how the business is built and run.

Not just that, all these shifts are playing out in a market that is large and intensely competitive.

India’s consumer appliances and durables market, spanning kitchen appliances, small electricals and consumer electronics, is estimated at over $130 billion, according to consulting firm Redseer, with growth driven by rising incomes, urbanisation and discretionary spending. Apart from legacy players like Havells, Bajaj Electricals, Crompton Greaves, Philips, TTK Prestige, Butterfly and V-Guard, who are innovating as well as heavily leveraging their brand and distribution, a growing cohort of startups have also emerged. Every category that Lifelong plays in has a slew of startups, like EDT and Nuuk in kitchen appliances, and Cultsport and Boldfit in fitness (see competition chart).

So far, only a few have broken through to build scale with recall.

Companies such as Atomberg and boAt have made that leap. Lifelong, having reached meaningful scale, is now at a similar inflection point. The question is whether the system that fuelled its first phase of growth can power its next phase.

That system rests on a tight link between what customers are looking for, what the company builds and how it delivers it.

“What Lifelong has built rests on a few key pillars - customer-backwards product design, deep manufacturing capability, and a cost-optimised supply chain," said Ravi Venkatesh, managing partner at Tanglin Venture Partners and an early investor in the company. "Individually, none of these are hard to replicate. The difficulty is in putting all of them together and executing consistently at scale, which they have already demonstrated.”

The value philosophy

At the core of Lifelong’s approach is a clear view of what it offers to the Indian consumer.

“We started with a very simple insight,” said Bharat Kalia, co-founder and chief executive of the company, explaining that Indians had started spending more on discretionary categories like fitness, home and lifestyle once basic needs were met. “At the same time, Indian consumers are extremely value-conscious. Even at the premium end, people still want to feel they are getting value.”

Co-founder and chairman Atul Raheja frames that idea through a more grounded lens. He recalls an early moment when a customer shared a photograph of a Lifelong mixer grinder placed on the floor of a small village home, next to a wood-fired stove.

“There’s such a vast population out there in India who all deserve to live well. They do not need the frills; they need good products at a price point they are willing to spend for those features,” he said.

Raheja had, in fact, attempted to build a consumer durables brand in the late 1980s. At the time, distribution in India was tightly controlled by layers of dealers and intermediaries, making it difficult to reach customers directly. The business did not scale, and Raheja eventually moved into other manufacturing ventures, including auto components and medical equipment.

His experience became relevant decades later when Raheja’s nephews, Kalia and Varun Grover, began exploring entrepreneurship.

Lifelong’s value philosophy defines how it builds, prices and distributes its products.

“We are a value-for-money brand, but that does not mean we are the cheapest. What we do is remove features that customers don’t really care about and invest in the features that matter most,” said co-founder Varun Grover.

For instance, Lifelong’s 20,000 mAh multi-cable power bank is priced at around ₹1,899, slightly lower than Xiaomi’s comparable model at about ₹2,199, but significantly higher than unbranded options that can sell for a few hundred rupees. The company is not trying to win on price alone, but on a balance between features, usability and affordability.

The secret sauce

This approach is reinforced by how the company identifies demand. Its early reliance on marketplaces gave it direct access to customer behaviour.

“We analyse thousands of customer reviews, search trends and feedback online,” said Grover, adding that in many categories they saw searches resulting in no sale due to lack of options or consumers opting for poorly rated products sold by unorganised players. “That is a clear signal for us that there is a gap in the market.”

The treadmill that Dua bought is one such example. Demand for home fitness equipment was visible, but existing products were bulky and not suited to smaller homes. Lifelong introduced foldable designs that lowered both price and usability barriers. Today, sports and fitness is the largest category for the company by value and is the fastest growing, followed by home and kitchen.

The same logic extends to manufacturing.

“Very early on, we decided that if we want to deliver strong value to the customer, we have to build the lowest-cost supply chain and manufacturing system,” Kalia said.

New categories are often tested through small batches, typically sourced from Chinese partners. Once demand is established, production is shifted to India through a network of partner or owned factories, allowing the company to retain full control.

The company is now expanding a roughly 200,000 sq. ft. facility in Manesar, Haryana, which is expected to anchor a larger share of its domestic production as volumes grow. Already, over 60% of its volumes are from Indian plants.

Its manufacturing depth has allowed the company to scale efficiently in its first phase of growth, says Kalia.

A detour and a reset

That trajectory, however, was briefly interrupted in 2022, when US-based Thrasio took a majority stake in Lifelong. The idea was to replicate Thrasio’s acquisition-led model in India.

However, Kalia and team quickly realised that the model did not work in the Indian context. “Small brands here are built with a lot of effort and context. You cannot just roll them up and replace the entrepreneur with a centralised system,” Kalia said. Many of the online-only or marketplace brands, which would have been the acquisition targets for Lifelong, were too small to meaningfully add value.

Thrasio’s own financial troubles, which led to a bankruptcy filing in 2023, added to the strain. The agreement was that Thrasio would bring in significant investments to finance the acquisition model. This clearly would not happen. Lifelong’s founders and investors bought back the stake the same year, and Thrasio has fully exited the company.

“In many ways, it felt like a rebirth,” Kalia said.

The episode slowed the company down, but it also clarified its path. Much of the company’s growth has come after this reset. That makes the current phase more significant.

Navigating larger complexities

If the first phase of Lifelong’s growth was defined by how efficiently it could identify demand and build products around it, the next phase is being shaped by how that system adapts to a changing consumer and a more complex operating environment.

One of the clearest shifts is how urban consumers are shopping.

Purchases that once involved search, comparison and delayed decision-making are increasingly becoming immediate and intent-driven on quick commerce platforms.

For Lifelong, this is opening up a new kind of distribution opportunity. Unlike traditional marketplaces, where discovery plays a central role, quick commerce is driven by availability and immediacy. Products need to be stocked closer to the consumer, and demand has to be anticipated and fulfilled with far greater precision and speed.

Kalia has indicated that this is where the company sees a potential long-term differentiator, but it is also a channel that requires sustained execution to get right.

Offline retail is evolving in parallel, but for different reasons.

While the company began with stores as experience centres, these stores have started to generate their own demand.

Lifelong has opted to launch and operate its stores in smaller cities such as Zirakpur, Ludhiana and Jaipur, where organised retail options in these categories remain limited and rentals are lower. The stores are now profitable, according to the company.

While the stores may have found early success, scaling up offline stores is a high-investment play. “As Lifelong expands into offline and omnichannel, they will have to factor in store rent, distribution overheads, and operational complexity,” said Kaushika Madhavan, chairman of consulting firm Kearney India. “While omnichannel is necessary, especially for categories requiring touch and feel or service, it also adds layers of cost and execution challenges.”

What’s in a name

However, the push into offline has implications for another area the company has so far deprioritised— brand building. With its no-frills, value-driven approach, Lifelong has historically kept marketing spends low.

“Till now, we’ve been primarily an online-first brand, and all our marketing spend has gone where the customer is,” Grover said.

In that environment, products compete on visibility, ratings and pricing rather than recall. Brand becomes more relevant as the company expands into higher-value categories and explores more premium segments. It is currently working on a brand uplift, but shifting existing perception is not straightforward.

“Once a brand is strongly associated with a certain positioning, say value or mass, it becomes very hard to shift that perception,” said Madhavan. “If Lifelong is currently seen as a value alternative to brands like Xiaomi, then moving upmarket within the same brand will be challenging.”

What the premium offering will look like and whether a new brand will be created is still being debated internally.

The after-sales stumble

However, the biggest stumbling block may be after-sales service.

In its early years, Lifelong operated largely in categories where the cost of failure for the consumer was relatively low. A grooming device or a small appliance that stopped working could be replaced without much hesitation. In higher-value and longer-use products such as treadmills and larger appliances, customers also expect reliable installation, servicing and support.

That gap is visible in customer experiences.

Bengaluru-based advertising executive Nishant Pratap purchased a treadmill on Amazon a couple of months ago, but the equipment would not start. He struggled to get clarity on whether the product would be repaired or replaced, eventually opting for a return after multiple interactions with customer support.

Grover acknowledges that the learning curve here is steep. “We are still learning when it comes to after-sales. Customer expectations in India are extremely high,” he said. The company offers after-sales service either through its own in-house technicians or through partnerships. It is also attempting to solve this using technology, like video support and remote troubleshooting. However, this is one area that is clearly work in progress.

Staying ahead

With competition only intensifying, Lifelong needs to ensure it is firing on all cylinders at all times.

“What stands out to me is that Lifelong seems to be trying multiple things simultaneously,” said Madhavan. “They are expanding their portfolio, building omnichannel distribution and exploring premiumisation. Each of these, individually, is a complex strategic shift.”

Therein lies the challenge and its moat.

The founders seem confident of pulling this off. “At the end of the day, our business comes down to one thing,” said Kalia. “Can we continue to create products that deliver the right value to the customer.”