Underneat.in’s Costly Pause: Why a ₹70 Lakh Loss Became a Trust-Building Bet

Khushi Bhatia

Underneat.in, a homegrown lingerie brand, pulled its best-selling “all-day push-up bra” off the shelves, scrapped thousands of finished pieces, and rebuilt the product from the ground up, an all-in decision that cost roughly ₹70 lakh but, by the company’s own account, rebuilt customer trust and delivered a stronger product.

The call came from co-founder and CEO Vimarsh Razdan, who said he could not “live with negative fit-related comments” that began showing up once returns and complaints spiked. What followed was an unusually transparent reset: the product was removed from the website, inventory was written off, and a 65-day sprint, spanning redesign, fit work, testing, and more testing, culminated in a relaunch that sold out in seven days and brought return rates below 5%.

What triggered the overhaul

The bra in question was already the brand’s top seller, buoyed largely by word of mouth rather than heavy promotion. But rising returns and fit complaints across body types signaled a deeper problem: the sizing system wasn’t working “no matter how much we wanted it to,” as Razdan put it to his team. The company decided that continuing to ship a flawed fit risked something more valuable than revenue, credibility.

The decision: pull, scrap, rebuild

Underneat.in did three things in quick succession:

Pulled the product from its website despite its bestseller status
Scrapped thousands of units already produced
Shifted to the factory floor, where the team reworked the product “from scratch,” rebuilding the sizing system and fit approach

The cost of that reset: ~₹70 lakh. Painful for a young consumer brand, but assessed internally as preferable to a long tail of dissatisfied customers.

65 days of iteration

Over a little more than two months, the company cycled through redesigning, refitting, testing, failing, and repeating. The focus was explicit: fix the fit across body types, not just in a narrow size corridor. While Underneat.in has not disclosed the precise technical changes, the process points to fundamentals, pattern corrections, grading logic, materials and elastics interplay, and quality control at pilot-batch scale.

The relaunch: signal in three data points

When the product re-hit the storefront, three outcomes stood out:

Sold out in 7 days
Return rate under 5%
Product-market promise matched: the bra “actually became the product we promised it would be”

Those metrics, particularly the sub-5% return rate, suggest that the fit work addressed the core pain point that had been eroding trust.

The Significance

In D2C apparel, fit is the battleground. Returns quietly tax margins, but the real cost is compounding reputation risk. Underneat.in’s move reframes the calculus: accepting a short-term P&L hit to protect long-term brand equity. For early-stage consumer businesses, it’s a playbook reminder that the most expensive decision can also be the one that prevents an even costlier spiral of refunds, discounts, and negative reviews.

Razdan’s framing is blunt: the ₹70 lakh loss hurt, but losing customer trust would have cost more. The sequence, listen to complaints, halt sales, fix the root cause, then relaunch with proof in the metrics, lands as a case study in putting user experience over momentum.