A complete brand study of Fausto, India's 2,000 SKU footwear marketplace player
Ask Fausto when it was born and you'll get four different answers. All from Fausto itself. The About Us page says 2011. A founder interview with Indian Retailer says 2017. The brand's own D2C platform, according to industry press, launched in 2021. And a second, older Instagram account run under the brand's earlier consumer-facing handle carries yet another version of the story entirely. Four birthdays, one brand, and nobody at Fausto has ever bothered to reconcile any of them. For a company asking you to trust its sizing, its materials, and its 60 to 75 per cent discount math, that's not a typo. It's a tell.
This is what happens when a brand grows its revenue faster than it grows its identity. The deeper this research goes, the more that pattern repeats, in the founding story, in the revenue numbers, in the social media bios, and in the customer reviews sitting just one search away from anything the brand says about itself.
Strip away the homepage language and Fausto is a private label footwear operation selling over 2,000 SKUs across men's and women's formal, casual, ethnic, and sandal categories. Most of that selling happens on Amazon, Myntra, Flipkart, and Ajio, with its own Shopify store running a distant second, though the brand itself claims its e-commerce platform now contributes 100 per cent of total sales. It launches at least 50 new styles every month.
The revenue story alone is worth pausing on, because it doesn't hold together. One set of public statements puts current revenue at roughly 30 crore, scaling from 12 crore, with a 100 crore target. A separate section of the same Indian Retailer feature states FY2023-24 revenue at 162 crore, a FY2024-25 projection of 220 crore, and a next-year target of 250 crore. These are not close numbers that could plausibly be rounding errors or different fiscal year cuts of the same business. They are an order of magnitude apart. Either two very different companies are being described in the same article, or Fausto's own public reporting of its size is simply unreliable. Whichever it is, a buyer, a partner, or a creator deciding whether to trust this brand has no consistent number to anchor to. That's a real business, somewhere inside these contradictory figures. The brand wrapped around it is where things stop adding up.
Before it was Fausto, the company was legally registered as FASHOS, founded in 2011 in Okhla, Delhi, by the same two people, Navin Joshua and Sumit Agarwal. An early YourStory profile describes Fashos.com as a personalisation-led shoe shopping platform, where users answered a questionnaire and got a stocked, algorithm-updated "My Store" of shoes matched to their taste, with roughly 40 per cent of all sales coming through that personalised storefront feature. Seed capital came from the founders themselves, with some pre-operative angel money from a few HNIs in the founder network.
That's a genuinely interesting origin, a personalisation-first shoe platform built over a decade ago, well ahead of when most Indian e-commerce sites were thinking about recommendation engines. Fausto doesn't tell this story anywhere on its current site. The brand quietly retired an entire decade of identity and product innovation- FASHOS, the personalisation engine, the "My Store" concept- and rebuilt around a generic value-fashion positioning instead. Whatever was learned in those years about personalised shopping seems to have been shelved along with the name.
The contradictions don't stop at the founding date. Fausto runs at least two distinct public-facing voices simultaneously, each telling a different story about what the brand is for. The brand's Facebook page describes an aspirational, performance-coded identity: "Unleash the beast within. Engineered for performance, crafted for those who dare to stand out." A separate, older-style Instagram account tied to the brand, carrying 12,000 followers and nearly 670 posts, runs a completely different bio: "At FAUSTO, our mission is simple: Bring value for money foot fashion to every feet for every SPECIAL occasion." That's a third positioning line, distinct from both the performance language and the "you'll be thrilled by the price" copy on the main site. None of these three lines agrees with each other, and none appear to have been retired in favour of the others; they simply coexist, scattered across different channels, each one true to whichever platform happens to host it.
Here's a detail that contradicts almost everything else the brand says publicly. As of August 2025, Fausto's employee count had dropped 60 per cent year over year, leaving the company with two employees. This is the same period in which founder interviews talk about hitting 100 crore (or 250 crore, depending on which figure is used) in revenue, launching in the UAE through Amazon, and exploring Australia as a long-term market.
A two-person team running a 2,000-plus SKU catalogue with 50 new styles a month, across five marketplaces, with active international expansion talk, is either an extraordinarily lean operation built on outsourced manufacturing and marketplace logistics, which is plausible and common in this category, or it's a sign the brand has scaled its messaging well past what its actual organisation can support.
A brand's own copy is one version of the story. Independent customer review platforms tell another. On MouthShut, Fausto Footwear carries a rating of 1.25 out of 5, with reviews describing slow or non-existent exchange responses and dismissive customer service. On DesiDime, multiple reviewers describe difficulty with refunds, confusing return policies that exclude coupon-discounted purchases, and customer service representatives described as rude. One reviewer specifically flagged that a no-return policy tied to coupon use isn't disclosed anywhere in the brand's stated policies, only enforced after the fact.
This matters for the same reason the founding-date and revenue inconsistencies matter. A company that already struggles to keep its own story straight across owned channels is now showing a parallel pattern in how it treats customers after the sale: inconsistent policy enforcement, unclear communication, and an apparent gap between what's promised at checkout and what's honored afterward.
Nearly every product on the New Arrivals shelf- wedding sandals, embroidered juttis, formal derbies- carries a Sale tag, with discounts running 60 to 75 per cent off the listed price. Stack a 10% first-order code on top. Then 5% for prepaid. Then 15% through loyalty points. Against this, the brand's performance-coded tagline and its "every special occasion" tagline both compete for attention with a homepage that simply says "you'll be thrilled by the price." Founder language reinforces the confusion rather than resolving it: one quote calls Fausto "a fusion of style, technology, and affordable luxury," another, in the same interview, says the goal is becoming "a value for money" brand. None of these are the same promise, and Fausto's own public materials use several of them interchangeably.