Saransh and Riddhi built Lab 88 in a home lobby. Now their drops sell out in 30 min

Saransh grew up in a shoe-business family and spent most of his twenties quietly refusing to join it. During COVID, with Riddhi Kapoor Sachdeva his co-founder, who came from a clothing family of her own he turned his home’s lobby into a workshop. Dining table as cutting table, sofas as fabric storage, three tailors stitching the first collection inside the house. The brand came out of that lobby with a name built around the number 8, the number Saransh’s family always carried. Lab 88 has been running since. Today it sells out exhibition drops in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Delhi in under thirty minutes.

A boy who refused to inherit shoes

Saransh never had a problem with the family shoe business. He just knew it wasn’t his.

What he did want to do was something that put his own stamp on the idea of a family brand something his parents could still see as “cloth kind of work”, familiar enough to not feel reckless, but entirely his to design. Riddhi came from a clothing family herself, so between the two of them there was a very specific thing they understood from the inside: a product has to be made for quality, not just made.

That became Lab 88’s non-negotiable before it had anything else a name, a logo, a customer, a stitch.

The year the dining table became a cutting table

The first year of Lab 88 happened at home.

Not in a studio. Not in a factory. Saransh’s own lobby a space he still laughs about calling a lobby turned into “the lab” overnight. The dining table was retired from its day job and became a cutting table. The sofas lined up with fabric rolls piled on them became the storage system. The living room was where three tailors and about six people in total put together the first-ever Lab 88 collection, by hand.

A college junior who was studying design joined as the sales lead at that same point, and she still works with them today.

Nobody involved knew exactly how to begin. “Steve Jobs started in a basement,” Saransh jokes about those months. “At least we started in a lobby two floors up.”

Three to four months just to find the fabric

The hardest part of year one wasn’t the stitching. It was the fabric.

Saransh and Riddhi both knew exactly what quality felt like in their hands, from growing up around their respective family products. What they didn’t yet have was the supplier network who to call, where to source from, which weaves and weights actually matched what they wanted. It took three to four months of back-and-forth before they settled on the fabric they could stand behind.

Saransh still looks back at that stretch and smiles. “Those were the days.”

Why “Lab 88”

The brand almost ended up being called simply “The Lab”.

The lab idea was personal for Saransh. Growing up, he always thought of inventors going down to a basement laboratory in a lift to tinker with things a space where you built the whole thing yourself from scratch. That’s exactly what the clothing idea felt like to him: a place to assemble and invent.

Then came the number.

8 was his family number. He wanted the brand to carry a piece of his family’s story into whatever he built. The moment they put “Lab 88” next to “The Lab” on paper, there was no contest. And once the name was locked in, something strange happened the whole design language of the brand started rotating around the number 8.

Infinity. Butterflies with wings shaped like 8s. An entire collection called Octo Lab, built around the octopus’s eight legs. A T-shirt where a crowd of tiny printed figures makes up the body of an 8, with one blank spot in the shape of the wearer themselves — “lakhon mein ek, 88.”

Saransh now sees 8s everywhere. On a recent drive back from Jaipur, he spotted a cell tower whose triangular frame had an 8 shape running through it, and he photographed it on the spot to send to his design team.

The thirty-minute sell-out they didn’t expect

Lab 88’s first exhibition invite nearly made Saransh more emotional than any sale would have. “I was just happy someone noticed us.”

He put five pieces on the stand upcycled sweatshirts made entirely from leftover fabric from previous collections. Half an hour after the exhibition opened, all five were gone.

That moment reshaped how he thought about exhibitions. Every drop Lab 88 takes to Mumbai, Ahmedabad or Delhi now carries two kinds of pieces the regular online line, and a set of exclusive exhibition-only designs that get made once and never remade. Saransh refuses to list the exhibition pieces online later, even when customers ask. “If someone bought a one-of-one from me at an exhibition, I’m not going to turn around and sell it to someone else on a website. That trust is the whole point.”

Nearly 99% of those exclusive pieces sell out at every exhibition they attend.

How they stay fresh without chasing trends

Running a clothing brand in India in the age of Instagram means every day someone is scrolling past ten brands at once. The temptation is to keep up. Saransh, early on, picked the opposite road.

“If you’re searching and running with trends, you’ll always just be searching and running with trends,” he says. “The identity has to be what are you building for yourself?”

So Lab 88 stays stuck to its core (the 8), and the creative freshness comes from somewhere else entirely art, music, movies, and whatever happens to inspire Saransh and Riddhi in a given year. Next year’s collection, Saransh reveals in the podcast, will be an entire series inspired by 1960s–1980s Bollywood vivid colours, bold prints, oversized lapels, big collars, dropped like movie releases, one themed capsule per season.

The customers who come back wanting new things

What Saransh loves most about running Lab 88 isn’t the first-time sale. It’s the second-time one. The customers who walk back into an exhibition stall a year later and say “I bought this from you last time, now show me something new.”

That’s the signal he reads before anything else. If repeat customers are coming back wanting new, the brand is doing something right. If they’re coming back wanting the same thing again, the brand has stopped growing.

The team that stayed

Saransh is clear-eyed about the setbacks the brand has worked through not knowing how to raise a GST invoice in year one, not knowing how to build a website, not knowing how to handle COD orders but the one thing he brings up when asked about his struggles isn’t any of those.

It’s the team.

The master tailors who were with him on day one are still with him today. The college-junior designer who joined on day one is still with him today. Growing a team from six to a working crew that pulls off multi-city exhibitions didn’t happen because Saransh went out and hired a hundred people. It happened because the first few believed in the vision and brought in the next few themselves. “Once your team sees that your vision is actually reachable, they help you expand it.”

What’s next

The current setback, Saransh says plainly, is space. Lab 88 has outgrown the lobby it was born in long outgrown it and the next stage is a full creative space the brand can invite people into. Not just a shop. A room where customers can walk in, artists and painters and designers can collaborate, and new drops can be built with that same intimacy that the lobby had on day one.

“The lab is coming back,” he says, “to the same original idea.”

The sentence he keeps repeating

Ask Saransh for the one thing to tell a young entrepreneur starting a brand, and he gives something closer to a worldview than a tip.

“When you stand for nothing, you will fall for anything.”

He pairs it with another one he’s lived through himself: a person sometimes has to wait ten years for his overnight success. The real work, he says, is not giving up before year ten starts.

Manifest. Keep working. Don’t stop. One day you’ll get there or, more accurately, you’ll already be there by the time you look up.