Anjana Reddy turned celebrity fame into a fashion company, not just an endorsement

The default way Indian business uses a celebrity is to rent the face: pay for an endorsement, run the campaign, move on. The economics are terrible for everyone except the agency, the brand pays for borrowed attention it never owns, and the star monetises a fraction of their pull. Anjana Reddy built Universal Sportsbiz (USPL) on the inverse premise: a star’s fame is an asset you can build a permanent, owned brand around, with the celebrity inside the equity rather than rented by the campaign. WROGN, built around Virat Kohli, is the proof of concept.

Young, internationally schooled, operator-first

Reddy started building young. An internationally educated background preceded an early entrepreneurial start in India rather than a long corporate apprenticeship, she was constructing the company in her twenties. That matters to how USPL is shaped: she did not arrive from inside the fashion establishment with its agency-and-endorsement habits, so she was free to treat “celebrity” as an ownable asset class rather than a line item in a marketing budget. Outsiders rebuild the rules precisely because they never absorbed them.

The insight from celebrity merchandising

Her pre-USPL work centred on e-commerce and celebrity-merchandising experiments, and that is where the thesis was found rather than theorised. Selling a star’s merchandise teaches you, in hard numbers, how much latent demand a celebrity actually carries, and how little of it a one-off endorsement deal captures for anyone. The logical next step is not a bigger endorsement; it is to stop renting and start building: a durable product brand with the celebrity’s identity at its centre and their incentives tied to its long-term value.

What USPL actually is

USPL was built to industrialise that idea into a repeatable machine: identify a star with a strong, ownable identity; co-create a fashion or lifestyle label with that identity at the core; and, critically, operate the entire product, supply-chain and retail stack behind it in-house. WROGN, the casual-fashion brand built around cricketer Virat Kohli and launched around 2014, became the flagship; the company extended the playbook into further celebrity-linked labels including the women’s brand Imara. The model is not “a famous person’s clothing line”; it is a brand-building company that happens to use celebrity equity as its raw material.

The hard part: it is still an apparel company

This is where most celebrity brands die, and the reason the model is harder than it looks. A famous name on the label does not suspend the brutal physics of apparel: design cycles, manufacturing, inventory risk, thin margins, omnichannel retail and relentless marketplace discounting all still apply. Celebrity gets you trial; it does not get you a supply chain, a return rate you can survive, or repeat purchase. USPL’s survival came from building the unglamorous operations muscle, the part fame cannot substitute for, not from the wattage of its partners.

Funding and structure

USPL raised external investment and built a portfolio of celebrity-anchored fashion brands sold across its own channels, retail and marketplaces, with the celebrity partners structured as long-term stakeholders/collaborators rather than paid endorsers, Kohli’s association with WROGN being the most visible example of equity-style alignment over a flat fee. Specific funding and revenue figures vary across reporting and are not printed here; the durable, verifiable point is the structural choice itself: own the brand and the operations, and put the star on the same side of the table as the company.

Growth strategy

Three moves define the playbook. Convert celebrity attention into an owned, repeatable brand-building machine instead of one-off endorsements, so the value compounds into an asset USPL controls. Align the celebrity’s incentives with the brand’s long-term equity, which buys authentic, sustained involvement that money-per-post never does. And treat the apparel operations stack as the real, defensible business beneath the famous name, because the fame is the wedge, but the operations are the moat.

USPL startup timeline

• Early 2010s, Founds Universal Sportsbiz Pvt Ltd (USPL) after earlier e-commerce and celebrity-merchandising work.
• ~2014, Launches WROGN, a casual-fashion brand built around cricketer Virat Kohli.
• Following years, Adds further celebrity-anchored labels (including the women’s brand Imara) and raises external investment.

USPL business model

Build owned fashion brands around a celebrity’s identity, with the star aligned as a long-term stakeholder/collaborator rather than a paid endorser, while operating the full design, supply-chain and omnichannel retail stack in-house.

WROGN / USPL competitors

In celebrity and youth fashion it competes with HRX (Hrithik Roshan, via Myntra), Myntra’s in-house labels, and mainstream menswear D2C; the women’s line Imara competes with ethnic brands such as Biba and W.

More founder journeys: women founders in fashion · women in D2C database · women founders in Bengaluru.

What Anjana Reddy’s story teaches Indian founders

That distribution assets, here, a celebrity’s attention, are wasted when rented and valuable when owned. The differentiated move was structural (build a brand around the star, align equity) but the survival depended on boring operational competence. Both halves are the lesson: a clever model still has to be run as a real business.

Frequently asked questions about Anjana Reddy

Who is Anjana Reddy?

Anjana Reddy is an Indian entrepreneur and the founder of Universal Sportsbiz (USPL), a company that builds owned celebrity-anchored fashion brands. Its best-known label is WROGN, built around cricketer Virat Kohli; the company has developed additional celebrity-linked brands.

What is Anjana Reddy’s net worth?

This is a privately held company, so there is no disclosed valuation or public net-worth figure; the founder’s stake is a private holding rather than a listed, market-priced one.

What does Universal Sportsbiz do?

USPL designs, manufactures and retails fashion and lifestyle brands built around celebrities, treating the celebrity as a long-term brand partner and owning the product, supply-chain and retail operations rather than running one-off endorsements.

What can founders learn from Anjana Reddy?

That an attention asset is far more valuable owned than rented, but a clever brand model still has to be executed as a real apparel operation. The differentiation and the discipline both matter.