When the covid-19 pandemic’s first wave hit India early in 2020, locking people at home, no one expected it to last long. But it did.
Two suitcase makers from Mumbai, among the three largest in the country, watched their revenue nosedive; profits vanished into ether. Revenue from operations shrank to a third for VIP Industries in 2020-21 and that of rival Safari Industries by less than half.
As the world moved on from that black swan moment, almost no one saw how different the post-pandemic trajectories of the two luggage makers would be. Six years and eight weeks after the first covid-19 virus case was reported in India, the country’s domestic and international travel industries are back in health, and have boomed, but the growth of its two market leaders could not be more divergent.
VIP and Safari each command roughly a third each of India’s organized market with the US brand Samsonite making for the rest, data from VIP Industries’ filings and analysts tracking the stock shows. But in the first nine months of 2025-25, ending December, Safari has overtaken VIP in revenue ( ₹1,574 crore compared to ₹ 1,422 crore). Safari has also left its rival in the dust on the bourses. Shares of VIP shed nearly 10% at a time the benchmark Nifty 50 expanded more than 50% even after accounting for March’s decline due to the West Asia war. Safari shareholders saw their company growing market capitalization nearly three times in the same period.
Meanwhile, the Indian luggage industry saw a sea change. Between before and after the pandemic, much of the organized luggage market moved from soft fabric suitcases to hard premium luggage even as e-commerce and modern trade unseated local, unorganized shops as the biggest channel, according to industry executives. A clutch of luggage startups, some founded by former executives of VIP and Samsonite, raised venture capital to kickstart a wave of ‘premiumisation’ in the Indian luggage market, much like how other segments of the economy—from automobiles to electronics and real estate to food—have responded to what is being called the K-shaped recovery after the pandemic.
How will this premiumisation wave change the fortunes of the legacy companies? Read on.
Wheels up. What’s changed?
Today, VIP and Safari stand at a crossroads. VIP confronts a shrinking business as it seems to have missed the premiumisation bus, yielding ground to competitors and slipping into losses. In the first nine months of 2025-26, its net loss totalled over ₹200 crore.
The company has new owners and a new management. They must now bring India’s quintessential luggage brand back to pole position.
Safari, meanwhile, has steadily gained ground but faces heat from new brands that can throw venture capital money at the coveted high-spending, urban Indian consumer. It must now learn the premiumisation game or risk losing gains made over decades, industry executives say.
Samsonite first entered India in the mid-1990s, when luggage was near-synonymous with VIP Industries. Unlike its rivals Safari and VIP, its flagship Samsonite brand squarely focuses on the premium, ‘global’ customer. However, over the years, the company launched sub-brands to branch out to mass-premium and mass-priced customers as well. In 2015, it launched a value segment brand Kamiliant, while it scaled up American Tourister, a mid-priced offering for younger, more design-conscious customers. Samsonite South Asia Pvt. Ltd is yet to file its latest financials for 2024-25. But its revenue fell 16% year on year to ₹1,942 crore in calendar year 2025, as per the company, while profits shrunk two thirds to just under ₹73 crore. Samsonite South Asia follows the calendar year for its financials.
India’s luggage industry is compounding at 13% rate annually—or doubling in six years—and is set to be a ₹38,000 crore business by 2028 versus ₹23,000 crore in 2024, says Sudip Ghose, founder and managing director of luggage startup uppercase.
Ghose was the managing director of VIP Industries until 2022 and headed marketing for Samsonite South Asia before that. The big shift in that growth is from unorganized to organized retail: more than doubling from ₹12,000 crore to ₹25,000 crore in the same four years.
“So, if you are a branded player, now is a large opportunity to grow,” says the uppercase honcho.
There is another shift taking place: estimates from a report by brokerage Motilal Oswal in September 2025 show hard luggage went from accounting for a third of the total organized market in 2021-22 to 55% by 2024-25. Hard luggage, both made from polypropylene and the sturdier polycarbonate, have become cheaper as more brands entered the business.
Besides, people are increasingly buying luggage online and in malls, supermarkets, and other organized retail stores. uppercase’s Ghose says e-commerce accounted for just 7-8% of total luggage sales when he was still at VIP pre-pandemic. Now, the number has ballooned to over 40%.
The ‘I, me’ identity
Yet another trend in luggage purchase is that urban, affluent consumers want choices as an extension of their identity.
These customers are already spoiled for choice. 33-year old Gurugram-based architect and designer Sanjana Mathur says she saw five-six luggage stores in a city mall when she went looking for a 3-piece set of hard luggage some months ago.
“VIP and Samsonite were just too expensive,” she says, adding that most were selling sets of 3 for upwards of ₹20,000. “VIP also looked like it was selling suitcases from another era.”
Instead, she settled for a set worth ₹13,000 from uppercase, which she says was lightweight, had features including a built-in laundry bag, and worked for her budget.
“Luggage, traditionally, has been seen as a very functional product, a box with four wheels,” Tanisha Jatia, founder and brand lead of luggage brand Urban Jungle and daughter of Safari founder Sudhir Jatia, tells Mint in an interview.
It was traditionally a collective purchase in India. Every family had one suitcase that would be shared—it would go with the parent on a work trip or with the son or daughter on an excursion or a job interview.
Post-pandemic, the Jatia scion says, every family member wants personal luggage. “The collective has gone to the individual,” she says. “I want my own bag for my own things. I don’t want to be carrying my mom’s or my dad’s suitcase.”
She’s obviously referring to the upper and middle class Indian buyer.
uppercase’s Ghose agreed pointing to how luggage has become an extension of a customer’s identity—much like a handbag.
All these changes are propped on the back of a massive surge in travel by Indians, both in the country and abroad. Latest available data from the ministry of tourism shows Indians are holidaying abroad in larger numbers than ever. Outbound travel crossed pre-pandemic levels in calendar year 2023 with 27.8 million departures, which grew another 11% to over 30 million in 2024.
The change in domestic tourism was even more dramatic: India recorded just under three billion visits in calendar year 2024, per ministry data, up more than 17% year on year. The ministry is yet to publish data for calendar year 2025, but indicators from businesses in the hospitality business show that both domestic and international travel grew at a steady pace last year, too.
A clutch of new age luggage companies has taken advantage of these changes, flooding the market and new sales channels with design-heavy hard luggage feeding into the ask for buyer identity. Data from research firm Tracxn shows the top online-first luggage startups have raised nearly $60 million in venture capital, led by Bengaluru’s Mokobara brand, which was last valued at about ₹700 crore.
The change at VIP
In July last year, Dilip Piramal, and his family, sold their 32% stake in the company to a consortium of investors that includes domestic private equity firm Multiples Alternatives and Caratlane founder Mithun Sacheti and brother Siddhartha Sacheti for over ₹1,700 crore.
The originator of the humble ‘attachee’, as the basic polypropylene briefcase was popularly referred to in the 1980s, was staring at an erosion of its fortunes before the deal. A string of exits followed the change in ownership: in September 2025, managing director Neetu Kashiramka resigned and was replaced by Atul Jain, formerly chief executive officer (CEO) of Orient Electric and a consumer durables veteran. In February this year, chief financial officer (CFO) Manish Desai resigned, replaced by Rahul Poddar, previously group controller at Reliance Retail Ventures and CFO of Reliance Jewels.
VIP Industries did not respond to requests for comments while the Renuka Ramnath-helmed Multiples Alternatives declined to comment for this story.
In an earnings call in August last year, in reply to a question on whether shrinking revenue at VIP was due to a decline in consumer demand, former managing director (MD) Kashiramka told analysts: “I think, it is more to do with competitive intensity. There is no issue on consumer demand per se.” She went on to make the point that VC-backed brands were able to undercut giants like VIP because they had money to burn.
“According to me, they will be losing,” she said. “Some of them have actually had exclusive partnership with some (ecommerce) portals.”
VIP Industries has been playing catch up with these shifts in its industry, even as it prepares to change hands. Pre-pandemic, hard luggage made up less than half of the company’s total revenue, as of the September 2019 quarter; post-pandemic, hard luggage had become more than two-thirds of total revenue, data from its investor presentations shows. Similarly, ecommerce drove only 14% of total sales for the company pre-pandemic; by 2022, this had reached to 22%. However, since then, VIP’s ecommerce share has stayed between 20-22%, although the Motilal Oswal report quoted above estimated that e-commerce was now contributing to about 31% of the company’s total revenue.
Besides, as the luggage industry premiumised, VIP’s trajectory seemed to be going in the opposite direction. The company’s premium and mass-premium brands—including VIP, Skybags, and Carlton—made up 70% of total sales pre-pandemic. This fell to 55% by the first quarter of 2025-26.
Instead, the company’s mass-priced brands—Aristocrat and Alfa—have been growing.
In the earnings call mentioned above, Kashiramka told analysts that 90% of the company’s e-commerce sales at the time came from Aristocrat, a brand known best for duffel bags and soft luggage among thrifty consumers.
Premium imperative
In all this, VIP is also dealing with a two-pronged problem—reducing the debt on its books and liquidating old inventory. At the end of 2024-25, VIP had net debt worth ₹367 crore while net inventory of unsold goods stood at a massive ₹698 crore. By the third quarter of 2025-26, this had come down by 22% and 38% respectively, but they weigh on the company’s books.
Meanwhile, Safari stares at a different set of challenges. Motilal Oswal estimates that Safari made nearly three in four rupees of topline from hard luggage in 2024-25, a sea change from some 19% in 2018-19. However, unlike VIP’s 60-40 split between its premium and mass brands portfolio, 80% of the Safari’s sales come from for its mass-priced luggage.
In 2023, Tanisha Jatia started Urban Jungle, running as an independent direct-to-consumer, or D2C, ‘startup’ within the Safari fold. About 3% of Safari’s sales came from this premium brand in 2024-25, according to Motilal Oswal.
Jatia says the growth is faster. “We are a two and half year old brand and we are at ₹100 crore ARR (annualised run rate) and we see that doubling next year,” she says. “There is a margin benefit from the premiumisation happening with Urban Jungle.”
Yet, she agrees, that mass-priced segment is still the bread and butter for Safari. “It is the largest segment that is also growing very rapidly, because the unorganized sector is shrinking and so, a lot of those consumers are upgrading to the likes of Safari.”
Urban Jungle’s competitors are further ahead in revenue but none are profitable. Data from Tracxn shows that Mokobara closed 2024-25 with sales of over ₹240 crore and losses of ₹10 crore while rival uppercase had a topline of ₹85 crore with over ₹35 crore in losses.
Despite the ‘D2C’ moniker, the luggage startups are diversifying distribution channels. For instance, Jatia is building a separate network of distributors, trade partners, and multi-brand outlets for Urban Jungle; she says the target customer for Urban Jungle is very different from that looking for Safari luggage.
Similarly, uppercase’s Ghose says he was clear from the get-go that his brand was not going to be ‘online only’. “We have 35 own stores and partner with 1,900 retailers including modern and general trade. Also, the frequency of luggage buying has increased from more than five years (between repeat purchases) to 2-2.5 years,” he says.
For Safari and VIP, fighting for the premium, online-first customer is going to be crucial—for the former to sustain its growth and for VIP to turn its fortunes around. But the fight is far from lost.
“Despite all the talk of D2C brands, the Indian luggage market continues to be dominated by value conscious buyers,” says Anand Ramanathan, partner and consumer industry leader at Deloitte. “But these buyers are getting more aspirational. They want those designs and features. For legacy players, they already command a strong recall among these buyers. But they will have to make their products more aspirational.”
In fact, the rivalry, it would seem, is just beginning: the two are in a fight over the Carlton brand, which accounted for 7% of VIP’s topline in the first quarter of 2025-26. It is positioned shoulder-to-shoulder with the premium Samsonite in India.
VIP first acquired the UK-based premium luggage brand Carlton in 2004. In 2019, Carlton Shoes, another company from the UK, and VIP, sued each other over the use of the brand for bags and luggage in India. In July last year, the Delhi High Court upheld an order stopping VIP from using the Carlton brand name. VIP could not sell Carlton bags for about a month, before the Supreme Court allowed it to sell its inventory.
Then came the twist: in February this year, Safari announced it had a deal with Carlton Retail Pvt. Ltd, a branch of the very UK firm that VIP Industries is in a legal battle with, to sell luggage and other products under the Carlton brand in a 20-year agreement.
A few days later, VIP said in an exchange filing dated 2 March that it was “concerned that this development is likely to create confusion in the minds of our customers, distributors and stakeholders.” The company sells products with the Carlton brand name abroad too, it added.
No legal challenges are out yet but the elbows-out jostling for dominance, in one of the world’s fastest-growing travel markets, is just beginning.
