Sanatan anime tees: how a college D2C brand got acquired

Most anime merchandise brands in India chase the same franchises — Naruto, One Piece, Demon Slayer — and compete on price against The Souled Store's ₹700 crore machine. Anime Devta did something different: it fused anime aesthetics with Sanatan and Indian historical figures, drew every design itself, and built a pre-order model where 90% of stock sold before a single unit shipped. In October 2026, the brand was acquired by Anil Chhikara, founder of Bolt91, and Sameer Sortur, founder of SquareCircle Global.

What Exactly Did Anime Devta Sell — and Who Was It For?

Anime Devta's product line was narrow by design. T-shirts, hoodies, posters, stickers, diaries, figurines, and collectibles — all carrying original artwork that placed Indian historical and mythological figures inside an anime visual language. On its store today, tees like Hanuman, Ganesha, Krishna and Ram sell for ₹1,199 to ₹1,499. Narasimha and Garuda come in premium puff print at ₹2,999, and the Kalki puff-print hoodie is ₹5,999. The brand described itself as the world's first 'Indian Anime' merchandise brand — not a reseller of Japanese IP, but an originator of a new aesthetic category.

The customer was a specific slice of India's anime-watching generation: fans who grew up on Naruto and Dragon Ball but also felt a pull toward Indian mythology and history. Anime Devta gave them something no imported figurine or licensed Crunchyroll drop could — a design vocabulary that was simultaneously theirs culturally and visually aligned with the medium they loved. The brand shipped globally (15–30 working days for overseas), with free shipping on prepaid Indian orders, signalling it was building for diaspora fans as much as domestic ones.

Anime's expanding thematic range — darker stories, psychological depth, characters drawn from non-Japanese cultures — has been creating exactly this kind of opening. When a medium starts exploring unfamiliar territories, merchandise follows. Anime Devta read that shift early.

How Did an Engineering Student Build a Merch Brand?

Anime Devta was founded by Dev Taneja, a student at UPES (University of Petroleum and Energy Studies) in Dehradun. Taneja was pursuing Electronics and Communication Engineering when the brand launched — a detail worth noting because it underlines that the founding insight was cultural, not commercial. He wasn't a fashion student or a supply-chain specialist; he was an anime fan who spotted a gap.

The company was registered as Anime Devta Brands Private Limited, headquartered in Greater Noida. By the time it appeared on Internshala, its employee count sat at 0–50 — a micro-team running a global D2C storefront. The brand built a Prime Membership programme, a POP Coins referral system (200 coins per invite), and a celebrity-trust signal on its homepage — 'trusted by celebs' — suggesting it was actively building community and social proof alongside product.

The UPES origin story was covered by the university's own blog in April 2022, framing it as a student entrepreneurship win. That early press gave the brand legitimacy in a market where most anime merchandise either came from large incumbents or unverified grey-market sellers. The fact that it was a named, registered Indian company making original designs — not bootlegging Japanese IP — was itself a differentiator in a category plagued by counterfeits. The same positioning challenge faces every small D2C founder trying to build trust without a ₹100 crore marketing budget, which is why getting your brand's fundamentals right before scaling spend matters more at the early stage than most founders admit.

What Anime Devta Charges, and Why It Has No Returns

Anime Devta is not a budget brand. On its store in October 2026, regular tees cost ₹1,199 to ₹1,499, a sleeveless Kaal Bhairav tee is ₹1,599, premium puff-print tees run ₹2,999 to ₹3,499, and the Kalki puff-print hoodie is ₹5,999. Several of the pricier designs show as sold out.

Those prices sit on original artwork. A fan is paying for a design they cannot buy anywhere else, not for a Naruto print that ten other sellers also stock. That is what lets a small brand charge more than a mass-market tee.

The store also states plainly: no returns, refunds or exchanges. For a brand that makes most of its stock to order, that is arithmetic, not attitude. A returned piece is a garment someone else did not order, in one person's size, and it has nowhere to go.

Richardson Handjaja, publisher of Animenomics, frames the structural reality clearly:

Anime Devta entered exactly this layer — original designs, no upstream IP licensing cost, direct-to-consumer. The margin math worked only if volume held and returns stayed near zero.

How Pre-orders Let Them Manufacture with Near-zero Waste

The smartest operational decision Anime Devta made was its pre-order model. Every new drop opened for pre-booking 20–60 days before the product launched. The brand's own FAQ states that 90% of stock sold out before the physical product even existed.

This is demand-led manufacturing — the opposite of how most apparel brands work. A typical D2C clothing brand forecasts demand, manufactures a run, then sells into that inventory (and discounts or writes off whatever doesn't move). Anime Devta inverted this: collect orders, then manufacture exactly what was sold. Dead inventory — the single biggest cash drain (money tied up in unsold stock) for small apparel brands — was structurally eliminated.

For a micro-team with limited working capital, this was the only viable model. It also created natural scarcity: once a drop closed, it closed. That scarcity fed the 'epic and legendary rarity drops' language on the homepage — Garuda, Narasimha, Dharmo Rakshit framed as collectible tiers, not commodity tees. The pre-order window also gave the team a built-in demand signal before committing to any production cost, which is the kind of capital-efficient thinking that keeps a small operation alive longer than its better-funded competitors expect.

What the 'Sanatan Anime' Positioning Actually Meant in Practice

The phrase 'Sanatan anime' is doing a lot of work. It signals to a specific Indian audience — one that is proud of Hindu and Indian historical identity — that this brand is for them, not a generic anime fan. It also signals to the broader market that Anime Devta is not a licensed-IP reseller and therefore not competing directly with Bandai Namco, Crunchyroll Store, or The Souled Store on the same SKUs.

The product list makes the positioning concrete: Kalki (the prophesied tenth avatar of Vishnu), Narasimha (the man-lion avatar), Garuda (the divine eagle), alongside epic figures like Karna and Ravan. These are not characters any Japanese studio owns. Anime Devta could create original artwork without paying royalties — no 8–15% licensing fee, no IP-approval cycles, no minimum guarantees to a production committee in Tokyo.

This is the business logic behind the cultural positioning. Anime Devta chose subjects from Indian mythology and history that mean a lot to its audience and that no company owns. A larger competitor cannot license 'Narasimha in anime style' from a Japanese rights-holder, because there is no such rights-holder. The artwork itself belongs to Anime Devta.

The viewer reaction to this kind of cultural-aesthetic fusion is telling. When fans encounter a familiar figure rendered in an unfamiliar but beloved visual style, the response is often surprise followed by ownership — a sense that the medium has finally arrived in their world. That emotional response is what drives the 'trusted by celebs' signal and the referral programme: fans become advocates because the product represents something they hadn't seen before.

Why India's 15 Crore+ Anime Fans are an Underserved Market

Mishaal Wanvari and Neha Mehta, co-founders of Anime India, have tracked this audience directly:

150 million fans (15 crore) is a number that should make every D2C founder stop. The global anime merchandise market is estimated at roughly ₹1.1 lakh crore and growing — yet most of that value flows through Japanese manufacturers, global distributors, and a handful of well-funded Indian incumbents. The gap between audience size and quality merchandise availability in India is still enormous, particularly outside the top-8 franchises.

Anime Devta's bet was that a meaningful slice of those 15 crore fans wanted something the incumbents weren't offering: Indian-origin designs, at accessible prices, from a brand that understood the cultural context from the inside. That bet was directionally correct. The question was always whether a micro-team could build the operational infrastructure to serve it at scale.

For context on how capital-light founders are solving similar distribution problems in adjacent categories, the pattern of pre-seed bets on niche Indian consumer platforms shows that the appetite for India-specific, culturally-rooted products is real and fundable — the challenge is execution at volume.

The Counterfeit Problem That Licensed Brands Like Anime Devta Were Solving

Most anime merchandise available in India is unlicensed. Rejoy Rajan, Head of Marketing at Celio India, put the problem plainly when his brand entered the category: most of the anime merchandise is unlicensed, and very few companies actually go to creator agencies to secure licenses in India.

For Anime Devta, the counterfeit problem was both a threat and an opportunity. Threat: an original-design tee at ₹1,199 sits in the same feed as a far cheaper bootleg Naruto print from a local vendor. Opportunity: by using original Indian-origin artwork — subjects no counterfeit operation would bother with — Anime Devta stepped outside the counterfeit ecosystem entirely. You cannot bootleg a design that only one brand has created.

This is a genuine strategic insight for any small merchandise brand: if you compete on the same IP as the counterfeits, you lose on price. If you create IP that is yours, counterfeiting becomes a compliment rather than a commercial threat. Anime Devta's Sanatan positioning was, among other things, a counterfeit-avoidance strategy built into the product design itself.

What the October 2026 Acquisition Says About Niche D2C

On 5 October 2026, founder Dev Taneja announced on LinkedIn that Anime Devta had been acquired by Anil Chhikara, founder of Bolt91, and Sameer Sortur, founder of SquareCircle Global. In his words, what started in 2022 as a simple idea during his college days grew into a brand with 30,000+ customers and a profitable D2C business. Anil Chhikara will take Anime Devta forward, with a focus on scaling the brand.

The deal makes sense because the model was built to be handed over. Pre-orders meant the brand did not sit on a warehouse of unsold stock. Original designs meant there were no licence fees or approvals tied to the founder. A global storefront brought in fans outside India. So a buyer gets a working brand, a loyal customer base and a design style of its own, without the usual stock problem.

The timing matters too, because the anime merchandise market in India is filling up fast. The Souled Store acquired Redwolf in May 2025 and is expanding into Japanese anime licenses — the exact territory Anime Devta occupied culturally, if not legally. Bandai Namco India announced made-in-India anime merchandise manufacturing in May 2026. Anime Times Store launched officially licensed Japanese anime merchandise in India in January 2026. A niche brand with its own customers and its own look is worth more to a buyer now than when the shelf was empty. This is the same pressure that makes early traction before a well-funded competitor arrives the single most important metric for any niche founder.

What Founders Can Learn From the Anime Devta Model

Anime Devta's run from a UPES dorm room to a profitable brand with 30,000+ customers, and then an acquisition, is a clean case study in niche D2C mechanics.

The pre-order model is underused. Most small apparel founders manufacture speculatively. Anime Devta proved you can run a real brand on demand-confirmed production. The 90% pre-sell rate is not a marketing boast — it is a working capital strategy. Any founder making physical goods should pressure-test whether their category supports this.

Original IP beats licensed IP at the micro-scale. Licensing costs, approval cycles, and minimum guarantees are designed for companies with ₹10 crore+ revenue. Below that, creating your own designs around subjects your audience cares about is both cheaper and more defensible. The constraint is design quality and cultural insight — both of which Anime Devta had.

A niche holds until bigger brands notice. For its first four years, nobody else owned the Sanatan anime look the way Anime Devta did. But a look is not protected by law. A better-funded brand can hire the same kind of artists and launch a similar style. That is part of why a brand that already owns the niche, with customers attached, is worth buying.

A no-return policy is a stock decision, not a customer-experience failure. When most pieces are made to order, a return is a garment nobody else ordered. Founders should be honest with customers about why the policy exists rather than hiding it — Anime Devta put 'NO RETURN, REFUNDS, EXCHANGES' in the site header, which is blunt but at least transparent.

Conclusion

Anime Devta built something real: original Indian-mythology-in-anime-style designs, a pre-order model that eliminated inventory waste, and prices its fans were willing to pay for art they could not get elsewhere. It grew to 30,000+ customers and was acquired four years after it started in a college. The lesson for every niche D2C founder: validate fast, pre-sell everything, and build a brand a buyer can pick up and grow.