How Two Childhood Friends Built Quoted Dhaaga Into a Bootstrapped Clothing Brand Without Spending a Rupee on Ads

Everyone loves to talk about the idea. Nobody wants to talk about the vendor in Old Delhi who forgot your launch was in two days and is still cutting cloth while your Instagram DMs are flooding with orders. That's the real story behind most clothing brands, and it's exactly where Ashish Pandey starts when he talks about Quoted Dhaaga.

Ashish co-founded Quoted Dhaaga with his childhood best friend and long-time business partner, Anand, in May last year, on May 9th to be exact. He's still holding down a corporate job on the side while running the brand, which is its own kind of hustle. In just over a year, with zero ad spend and zero outside funding, Quoted Dhaaga has sold between 3,500 and 4,000 pieces across t-shirts, hoodies, and tank tops, through a mix of D2C sales on their own website and B2B orders.

What makes the story worth telling isn't the revenue number. It's how they got there. Ashish and Anand had already started and shut down ventures together before this one, so they knew exactly what people warn you about when you go into business with a close friend, and they did it anyway. Quoted Dhaaga was born out of a very specific personal frustration Ashish had with the clothing market, not a spreadsheet full of market sizing.

This conversation is about what it actually takes to build a brand, not just sell a t-shirt, in a market where vendors don't take you seriously until you're already big, and where a single reel with "low effort content" can outperform everything you planned for.

Key Takeaways: Building a Brand When You Have Nothing But Patience

The Idea Came From a Personal Itch, Not a Business Plan:

• Ashish couldn't find affordable, relatable clothing after watching the Nimsdai Purja documentary "14 Peaks" on Netflix, where the line "giving up is not in the blood, sir" stuck with him. The only similar hoodie he found cost 8,000 to 9,000 rupees.
• Months later he impulse-bought a random Instagram t-shirt that said "staying in my lane," something he'd normally spend two to three days deliberating over. That impulse buy became the insight for the entire brand.
• The gap he identified: loud printed t-shirts (elephants, tigers, eggplants) exist everywhere, but nobody was building relatable, personalized clothing you could actually have a conversation about.

Zero Ad Spend Is Not a Slogan, It's the Whole Strategy:

• Quoted Dhaaga has sold 3,500 to 4,000 pieces combined across D2C and B2B channels with no meta spend and no paid marketing at all.
• On launch day, with only around 400 Instagram followers, they got 37 orders between 7 PM and 10 PM, purely from a month of pre-launch content.
• Ashish is explicit that going up against big brands backed by groups like Aditya Birla on paid ads is a losing game for a bootstrapped founder. Cheap 299-rupee t-shirts from big players aren't a pricing strategy you can compete with, they're a war of attrition you'll lose.

Launch Day Chaos Is a Rite of Passage, Not a Red Flag:

• Their first vendor order was five lots (a lot being a minimum batch per color, roughly 40 to 50 pieces in Delhi), and the vendor still wasn't ready two days after promising the stock.
• Ashish spent a full day, 10 AM to 11 PM, at the vendor's workshop watching t-shirts get cut and stitched in real time, including catching and rejecting a t-shirt with a hole in it.
• His takeaway for anyone starting out: vendors will always undervalue a newbie brand in favor of bigger paying clients, and you have to be firm without getting demotivated. A year later, the same vendors now call Quoted Dhaaga if three days pass without a new order.

Q: You run Quoted Dhaaga alongside a corporate job, and your co-founder is your childhood best friend. There's a whole narrative around not starting businesses with close friends. What's your take?

Ashish Pandey: Yeah, you're right. Like, there is this thing for sure that you should not start businesses with very close friends. But my co-founder is my best friend and he's been my co-founder since 10 years. We've started things, they have not worked. We've shut down, we started things. Some have worked, we've exited, but shut down the whole, there's been a hole. I mean if you have people with you working with you, I think that helps a lot. There was a time when things did not work out. Then I went for a job, he went for a job. We both ended up working for two, three years and then again we started something else. So you need to have that kind of trust.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A co-founder who's already survived a failed business with you isn't a risk, they're a proven track record. Trust built through a shutdown is worth more than trust built over a coffee meeting.

Q: Take me back to May 9th, or even before that. Whose idea was Quoted Dhaaga? How did it start?

Ashish Pandey: There's not one reason to start Quoted Dhaaga. I would say it can drop down to two, well, I think three points. The first would be obviously I always wanted to do something of my own business. I have been doing a corporate job, and I'm still doing a corporate job alongside this business, but I always had this gist inside me that I am a better entrepreneur than I'm a corporate guy. So I always wanted to start something of my own. Why Quoted Dhaaga specifically? I remember around 2023, I was watching this documentary called 14 Peaks: Nimsdai Purja on Netflix. He has this dialogue saying "giving up is not in the blood, sir" and that struck me. I was searching around for some hoodies or clothing around that idea and I didn't get any. The only one I found was from Nims Purja and that costed around 8,000 or 9,000 rupees a hoodie, and not everyone will buy that, including me.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The best business ideas usually start as a failed shopping trip. Ashish couldn't find what he wanted to buy, so he built the thing that didn't exist.

Q: So how did that turn into an actual product idea?

Ashish Pandey: Some months later I was just randomly scrolling Instagram and found this random t-shirt saying "staying in my lane" or something like that. I just clicked and bought it without thinking anything. Months later I recalled why I did that, because I'm somebody who goes around online shopping but always thinks about it a lot. Maybe two to three days scrolling through the catalog, thinking, making choices, and then I'll finally buy something. But that came to me very suddenly. When me and my co-founder were thinking about a business, this experience stayed with me and I was like, people actually want relatable clothing. There are loud prints in the market, elephants, tigers, eggplants, but something that represents relatable clothing, personalized clothing where you have one-on-one conversations, doesn't exist in the market. I randomly spoke about all of this with my friend and he was like let's do it. So Quoted Dhaaga was born out of that.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: An impulse buy you can't explain to yourself is market research most founders pay agencies lakhs to discover.

Q: Did you not feel it's a crowded market to get into?

Ashish Pandey: Well, of course it's a pretty crowded market and it's not for everyone. It's one of the easiest industries to start in these days. There are multiple vendors across Delhi, Bangalore, who have readymade t-shirts you can sell online. But we always knew that if you want to build a brand, it will be a brand. There is a difference between selling a t-shirt and building a brand. If you're selling a t-shirt online, there are multiple brands doing that, random meta ads, but you never remember the name because they are not representing anything. That is something we were always in favor of, that we'll have to build a story around it, not just randomly start anything. We'll have to be very patient, build it bit by bit, break by break, and it will take a lot of time. There are brands who start today and go into meta marketing the next day. We are not someone like that.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Selling a t-shirt is a transaction. Building a brand is a relationship you're willing to lose money on for a year before it pays off.

Q: How has the last one year been? Where are you now, and how many pieces have you sold?

Ashish Pandey: So we have two channels. One is the D2C model, basically we sell through our website, we are not present anywhere else right now. The other is the B2B model. If we combine both, we have been able to sell across 3,500 to 4,000 odd t-shirts, hoodies, tank tops, everything combined.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Four thousand pieces sold with zero ad budget isn't a vanity metric, it's proof the product and the story are doing the selling, not the algorithm.

Q: You're completely bootstrapped with no ad marketing, no meta spend. What's driving those sales?

Ashish Pandey: Yeah, completely bootstrapped. No ad marketing, no meta spend, nothing. Just been through our content pieces and through the B2B channels. That's it.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: When your entire go-to-market is content and word of mouth, every single post is doing the job an entire performance marketing team usually does.

Q: What do you think is so interesting about your content? How have you broken content down?

Ashish Pandey: My co-founder has been a content creator for so many years. Me, I always have this itch in my mind that if I go out on the content creation journey, I know the reels will go viral because I have a lot of crazy ideas, that "bakchodi" is always there in my mind. When you make out a story out of the content, if you show people that we are not a brand just to sell something, we are there to tell you a story, how we are going behind the scenes, what the struggles are, if somebody watching us on Instagram wants to start a clothing brand today, they can go to our Instagram and figure out what goes into building a clothing brand because we have put everything out there. That one reel we still remember went across a million views and that was a Eureka moment for us. We were like, how come that was so shareable, and that was very low effort content.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Behind-the-scenes content works because it turns customers into witnesses to your struggle, and witnesses become your most loyal buyers.

Q: Is virality something you can predict or repeat?

Ashish Pandey: Not every time will it go viral, you'll have to be very patient with it. Maybe someday the best content will get only 100 views, and the worst content will get a million views. That is how Insta is. You cannot predict what's going to happen.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Chasing a formula for virality is a trap. Chasing consistency is the only strategy that actually compounds.

Q: You started with zero investment, fully bootstrapped, no ad spend. What was the hardest problem you ran into?

Ashish Pandey: I have a story around this. We were about to launch our brand on a Thursday. You have to go out to vendors and contact them, so we walked around the streets of Delhi for a month or two trying to find one, then finally stuck with one and communicated with them. We gave out an order for five lots, a lot being, for somebody who doesn't know, the minimum batch you can order per color. Delhi vendors give out some 40 or 50 pieces per lot. We bought five lots like that, five different colors, and they had to be stitched, the cloth had to be purchased and stitched by the vendor. We told him we'll be launching on Thursday, orders will come in, please be ready with the end product by Saturday.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Every founder's origin story has a supply chain villain. Ashish's just happened to wear an apron and cut cloth for a living.

Q: What happened when Thursday came around?

Ashish Pandey: Delhi vendors are very notorious for not valuing you as a newbie in the market. He never actually thought we'd get orders on Thursday because we weren't doing ad spend, and till date if we tell somebody we're not doing any ads, they're like "how come you are not doing ads and you are still selling?" We had been posting Instagram content since a month before launching. On Thursday we got 37 orders, it was 7 PM and by 10 PM we had 37 orders, and that was a moment I still can't fully process, because we were just 400 followers on Instagram at that time.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Thirty-seven orders on 400 followers is a better conversion story than most brands get with a paid campaign and a media agency behind them.

Q: And the vendor still wasn't ready by Saturday?

Ashish Pandey: We went and said "sir, is it ready? Please give it to us, we'll take it from you now." He was like "sir, sir please beta." I just walked around and saw nothing was ready, they were cutting the cloth at that time, 200 t-shirts had to be prepared. I went around 10 AM, 11 AM that day and came back home around 10 PM, 11 PM. It was a full day. There was one incident I particularly recall, there was a t-shirt with a small hole in it, and I saw it. I took the t-shirt and gave it to him and said, "we are trying to build a brand, how can you just stitch it, you'll have to discard it." For people trying to start something in clothing, please never get demotivated from things like this, because vendors will always devalue you if you're a newbie in the market. They will always value higher paying clients first. You will never be valued enough, but you'll have to be very firm in what you're trying to do.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A hole in a t-shirt is a small thing. Letting it slide because you're scared to push back on a vendor is how a brand quietly becomes just another factory outlet.

Q: Has that vendor relationship changed since then?

Ashish Pandey: Touchwood, our vendors value us too much now because we are giving them orders. So now the scene is like if in 3 days we're not giving a new order, they call us, "everything okay, sir?" That's how the boards then change. The first challenging experience was itself very unique, and now if we try to recall it, it's very funny.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Leverage in business isn't something you negotiate for, it's something you earn by showing up consistently until the other side needs you more than you need them.

Q: With Quoted Dhaaga, what do you think is truly yours, something another brand can't copy?

Ashish Pandey: We were always trying to build a story. That story can be as simple as, I am someone who believes in mythological readings, I believe in the law of karma, so Quoted Dhaaga has a t-shirt called Karma. Take this one I'm wearing, "Sabra," this is the best seller till date. Strangers, first time buyers, come to our website and buy a Sabra for sure, and the design itself isn't that unique, it's just a Hindi word. But that relatability, wherever I go wearing this, people always observe the word and go "oh." So the connection we're trying to build is that a customer never goes back without buying, there's always something for him to get related with. We've seen this age of minimalistic clothing, plain t-shirts with unique logos, and we're trying to build relatable clothing instead, a brand that has something in the catalog for everyone.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: A logo can be copied in a week. A word that makes a stranger stop and read your t-shirt on the street can't be reverse engineered that easily.

Q: You also mentioned a customization section on your site. How does that work, and is it scalable?

Ashish Pandey: You can just pitch in your idea, if you don't have a design, fine, our team will sit on that design, we'll have a conversation with you over WhatsApp, over Instagram, and connect with you after you place the order. People love that till date, and some people also ask us if it's scalable or not. We're like, obviously it's scalable because we've set up a proper team for all of these customers. That's always on the top of our mind, that we want people to feel very relatable with their clothing.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Most brands automate the human touch away the second it gets inconvenient. Quoted Dhaaga built a whole team around keeping it.

Q: Do you see AI eventually taking over that customization process?

Ashish Pandey: AI is in the near future, we are thinking about it. All the tech side of things I take a look at, and Anand is looking at operations right now. We're thinking about the AI aspect of things, but we'll try to minimize the use of AI because sometimes it is frustrating, it just circles you round and round and round and never gives you the correct information. So we'll have to be very strategic about the use of AI.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The smartest use of AI right now might be knowing exactly where not to use it yet.

Q: How has customer experience shaped the brand beyond just the clothing itself?

Ashish Pandey: Customer experience is something we have always prioritized since day one. I've always observed brands doing great with their packaging, the product is fine, but when you unbox something, that itself is an experience, and that was always on the top of our minds, that we'll have to do crazy with packaging and customer experience. Things are working in that way for us, we're trying to build a community that trusts us, knows the quality they'll get at Quoted Dhaaga. If we launch another SKU tomorrow, they can buy it blindly because they know the quality will be good.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: Trust is the only feature a competitor can never copy overnight, and unboxing experience is where that trust gets built one order at a time.

Q: Last question. Where do you see Quoted Dhaaga five years from now?

Ashish Pandey: Five years is a lot of time, I mean teams are doing crazy things in five years. For me and even for Anand, if we walk on a random street some day after five years and see every fourth or fifth guy wearing a QD merchandise, I think we will have arrived. We're not bragging, we're not overestimating ourselves, but this is very much achievable and we are working towards that. There are a lot of things coming up at Quoted Dhaaga. And also obviously a physical store, I can manifest that, I see that picture every night when I go to sleep. That would be success for us after five years.

🔥 ChaiNet's Hot Take: The clearest vision statements aren't written in a boardroom deck, they're the picture a founder falls asleep imagining every single night.

Final Thoughts: Patience Is the Whole Playbook

Ashish's closing perspective: "We are trying to do crazy shit, you know, just to reach there."

The bottom line: Quoted Dhaaga's story is a reminder that a real gap in the market doesn't always show up as a spreadsheet insight, sometimes it shows up as an impulse buy you can't explain to yourself for months. Ashish and Anand didn't have funding, a media budget, or even much of an Instagram following on launch day. What they had was a clear point of view on what a "brand" means versus what a "product listing" means, and the patience to build the former even when the latter would have been faster.

The vendor story matters because it's the part most founders leave out. Building a supply chain from scratch as a nobody in the market means getting devalued, getting delayed, and having to physically show up and fight for quality on day one of your own launch. That's not a footnote, that's the job.

What's next for Quoted Dhaaga looks less like a pivot and more like doubling down: more SKUs, a physical store on the horizon, a cautious approach to AI in customization, and a continued bet that content and community can outcompete ad budgets if you're willing to be patient enough to let the story build.

Q: How can people connect with you and follow the Quoted Dhaaga journey?

Ashish Pandey: People can find us on Instagram and on our website, that's where all the content and the customization conversations happen. We're not present anywhere else right now, so that's the best place to see what's coming next and to place a customized order directly with our team.

Final words: Quoted Dhaaga didn't get built by chasing what was fastest, it got built by chasing what was true to a very specific, very personal idea of what relatable clothing should feel like. If there's one thing to take from Ashish's year, it's that a brand isn't the logo or the print, it's the story you're patient enough to keep telling, order by order, hole-in-the-t-shirt by hole-in-the-t-shirt, until strangers start reading the words on your chest and going "oh."

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