Peter England, BIBA and Libas launch youth sub-brands while Trent and ABFRL build standalone formats. Early data shows 85% sales growth at Libas's Gerua.
India's legacy apparel brands are chasing Gen Z shoppers through a split strategy. Some are launching youth-focused sub-brands under existing labels. Others are building standalone formats from scratch. At stake is a consumer who wants lower prices and shifts tastes quickly through social media, without alienating the older customers who built the original brands.
Peter England, BIBA and Libas have taken the sub-brand route in recent months, rolling out VYBE, BIBA NXT and Gerua. The approach lets them create a distinct offer for younger shoppers while leaning on the parent brand's sourcing, manufacturing and distribution network.
Trent has gone the other way. It built a portfolio of retail concepts – Westside, Zudio, and more recently Burnt Toast – each aimed at a different consumer segment. Reliance Retail launched Yousta as a separate fashion format. Aditya Birla Fashion and Retail Ltd. (ABFRL) created OWND! as a standalone business.
The choice matters beyond branding. A standalone format gives a company freedom to build a new identity and organization around a specific consumer. A sub-brand offers speed and lower execution risk by using an established company's infrastructure.
For Peter England, the decision to launch VYBE came from a need to attract younger buyers while keeping the decades-old brand relevant. "If we can recruit the customer at a much younger age bracket, he will continue with the brand and grow with us," said Anand Iyer, chief business officer at Peter England.
Gen Z shoppers want looser fits, oversized silhouettes and versatile clothing, Iyer said, with fashion discovery driven by digital platforms. "For them, the mall is Instagram," he said, explaining VYBE's focus on social media, creators and music-led campaigns.
Libas took a similar path with Gerua, aimed at younger shoppers and first-time office-goers. The company concluded that stretching its core catalogue would not serve a consumer with different spending habits and expectations.
"We wanted to build something specifically for first-time office-goers, rather than stretch our core catalogue to try and serve them," said Sidhant Keshwani, founder and chief executive of Libas. "That's a very different consumer, with a very different price sensitivity and a very different relationship with brands."
Building Gerua within the Libas ecosystem means the company does not have to create an entirely new backend. "We're leveraging our existing teams, our manufacturing relationships with 100-plus factories across India, and our design and R&D capability in-house, without needing to build any of that from scratch," Keshwani said.
The strategy is showing early returns. Sales from Gerua have risen 85% since its launch in April 2025. Repeat purchases are at 45%. The collection has contributed 22% of new customers to Libas.
BIBA is pursuing a similar balance with BIBA NXT. Siddharth Bindra, managing director of BIBA, said the new line lets the company build a more contemporary proposition for younger consumers while retaining the advantages of consumer trust and an omnichannel network. Around 60% of BIBA NXT shoppers are new to the brand, with the company testing which styles and price points resonate before expanding.
The standalone approach provides more room to build not just a new brand but a separate organization. That is the route ABFRL took with OWND!, its youth-focused value-fashion format, initially housed within its Pantaloons business. The company has since separated OWND! from Pantaloons as it refines the business model. "We have dedicated the business separately from Pantaloons management and created a whole new team," Ashish Dikshit, managing director of ABFRL, said during the company's first-quarter earnings call.
ABFRL has also built a broader Gen Z play through TMRW, its platform for digital-first fashion brands, with labels such as Bewakoof, The Indian Garage Co., Nobero and Veirdo. The company is still finetuning the format and has yet to reach format-level profitability, underlining the trade-off in building a business from scratch.
For Trent, the strategy has been to build a portfolio of distinct brands rather than stretch one label across different consumers. Zudio's success has shown the potential of a standalone, sharply positioned value-fashion format, while the company has added Burnt Toast to address younger, trend-conscious consumers, including the emerging Gen Alpha cohort.
Yet the choice between a standalone brand and a sub-brand may not determine success on its own.
"Brand architecture may not be the biggest criteria of success," said Rishav Jain, managing director and co-lead of the consumer, consumer tech and retail practice at Alvarez & Marsal India. "While new lines can be created, success is driven by the ability to diverge from traditional operating models."
Faster product refreshes, limited inventories, sharper pricing and an agile backend are critical for winning younger consumers, Jain said. Standalone formats typically carry less legacy baggage, while established companies can become constrained by their own scale and processes. "Existing scale may not be the biggest competitive advantage when catering to the new-age consumers. Often scale brings in rigidity and inability to change to an agile design-to-deliver model," he said.
That does not rule out the sub-brand model. "Sub-brands can succeed too if they can follow an agile operating model," Jain said.
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