Taran Chhabra and Amar Preet Singh (Photo by arrangement)

Footwear is often associated with international labels, fashion trends and celebrity endorsements. However, a homegrown brand from Hyderabad is placing its faith in something far more personal: customers talking to other customers. Neeman’s idea is simple. Make a shoe comfortable enough for someone to wear throughout the day, and that experience could become the strongest reason for another person to try it.

“Customers are our brand ambassadors,” say founders Taran Chhabra and Amar Preet Singh
.
That belief has accompanied the brand's journey from an online-first business to a growing retail presence. Neeman’s recently marked the opening of its 50th store in Hyderabad, the city where its journey began, and is now looking at reaching 500 stores across India over the next three years.
For the founders, however, the challenge goes beyond expanding the store network. It is about convincing Indian consumers to trust a relatively new name in a category where established brands have enjoyed familiarity for decades.
“We are a low trust market. We don't trust brands easily. So it takes time to build business. It takes time to build credibility,” they explain.
That understanding influenced the brand's early strategy. Having started online in 2018-19, Neeman’s focused on building a community before moving more aggressively into physical retail. The founders believe that while online platforms help consumers discover products, footwear remains a category where trying something on matters.
“We have been online for five years. We started off online in 2018-19. We have crafted a very strong community,” they say, adding that online discovery and offline purchasing complement each other. According to them, 75 per cent of footwear buying in India continues to happen offline.
But what makes someone recommend a pair of shoes in the first place?
The founders believe that the answer lies in addressing the small discomforts people have come to accept as part of wearing footwear. A shoe might look fashionable, but that does not necessarily mean someone would want to wear it from morning until night.
“The basic agenda was how can we make people fall in love with that footwear,” they explain.
Their approach began with listening to customers and identifying recurring concerns. Weight, breathability, cushioning, grip and shock absorption became important considerations in product development.
“We heard customers speak about all these things in bits and pieces over and over and over again and we addressed all these pain points across different categories,” they say.
The founders also point to an interesting aspect of Indian footwear habits. India, they say, has a particularly large market for open footwear, and encouraging consumers to choose shoes for everyday use meant making them practical enough for long hours.
That required thinking beyond appearances. Rather than chasing short-lived fashion trends, the emphasis was on minimal designs that could work across different occasions.
“We are not going after short term trends. We have great design, we have great aesthetics and we have products that are super minimal,” they explain.
For Neeman’s designer Kiran Makhija, the challenge is to make comfort visually appealing without restricting the products to a particular age group.
“The best part of my job is to be more creative and come up with cool stuff, cool colors, cool designs, which can cater to every audience because we focus on comfort,” she says. “We don't focus on any age group.”
There is also the question of whether footwear designed for international markets necessarily suits Indian consumers.
The founders believe Indian requirements deserve greater attention, particularly because of differences in foot shapes and climatic conditions across regions. They point out that consumers in different parts of India may have different fitting requirements, making research and product testing important.
“Indian feet are very different. Our choices are very different,” they say, explaining that the brand does not rely on international trends when deciding what to develop.
The other important consideration is what goes into making a shoe.
Neeman’s has experimented with materials including merino wool, organic cotton, recycled plastic bottles and recycled tyres not to mention, recycled paper packaging. While sustainability has become a familiar talking point in fashion, Kiran says incorporating such materials into footwear presents its own design and manufacturing challenges.
“Finding leather is very easy but creating a shoe with merino wool or cotton or recycling the plastic bottles is not an easy job,” she explains. “So we took up that challenge and we wanted to create something which is good for the environment.”
The challenge, she adds, is to combine these material choices with comfort and accessible pricing rather than treating them as separate considerations.
Akshit Dhingra, Vice President, Marketing, Neeman’s, sees the combination of sustainability, versatility and minimal design as central to the brand's identity.
“Bringing all these three together and making this accessible to all the consumers from the price point as well as the availability,” he says, describing the proposition he wants to take to a wider audience.
The founders believe customers respond to a combination of qualities rather than any single feature.
“Product consistency, people just rave about how comfortable the shoe is, people talk about how it's just the right value, how durable the shoe is,” they say, adding that customers also appreciate the brand's efforts to incorporate environmentally responsible materials.
Interestingly, there is a family story behind the name itself. Neeman’s combines Neelam and Manjeet, the names of the founders' parents. What began as a personal connection has now become part of the identity of a business with ambitions extending well beyond Hyderabad.
For Kiran, that ambition can be summed up in four words: “Har Ghar Mein Neeman’s.”
The founders are also looking to expand the product portfolio, particularly in women's footwear, with plans to introduce a children's range next year.
Yet, as Neeman’s looks towards a much larger retail footprint, with the hope that the trust built through its early community can continue to grow alongside the business.
For Amar and Taran, the answer still comes back to the customer. Their belief is that comfort brings people to the product, consistency encourages them to return, and a good experience gives them something worth talking about.
In a business where getting noticed is one challenge and being remembered is another, Neeman’s is betting that the most valuable conversation about a pair of shoes may be the one that happens between two customers.
Tags: