The Souled Store History & Founding Timeline

The Souled Store was slow to pursue anime licensing despite the rapid growth of anime fandom among Indian Gen Z consumers from approximately 2018 onward, ceding early market positioning in this category to smaller players and allowing the gap to widen before initiating a formal anime licensing strategy.

Allowing Marvel and DC licensed merchandise to constitute a disproportionate share of revenue created franchise concentration risk — if either licensor changed terms, increased royalty rates significantly, or launched competing direct retail, the revenue impact would be material and difficult to offset quickly.

The pace of physical store openings in certain periods outran the brand awareness and customer acquisition infrastructure needed to make individual store locations profitable quickly, creating a fixed cost burden that pressured operating margins during the investment ramp-up period.

Extended reliance on Myntra and Amazon for new customer discovery created a structural situation where a meaningful share of The Souled Store's customer base had a primary brand relationship with the marketplace rather than with The Souled Store directly, requiring investment to migrate those customers to owned D2C channels.