THE BRIEF
The Indian workday was never the brief.
Like most of us, I had an unwritten dress code: smart casual. Which sounds simple, until you go looking for the one shoe that is office-appropriate, goes with everything, stays comfortable all day, and still says something. That shoe does not exist. So I did what everyone does. I looked at what the people I respected were wearing and bought the iconic pair — the retro sneaker that pop culture had turned into an everyday icon.
It is a beautiful shoe, and a deserving one — it earned its place in cabinets around the world, and it has plenty of happy owners here. But it was drawn for other feet, other streets, other weather. On my wide feet — most Indian men have them — no amount of sizing up ever sat right. The sole was thin enough that I could feel the broken pavement outside the office through it. None of it was bad enough to complain about. So I didn't. I wore them, the way everyone wears them, and called it normal.
But every time I put them on, a small part of me registered it as a compromise. The most expensive pair in my cabinet, and I was settling — on fit, on comfort, on whether a shoe was made with my feet, my roads, my day in mind. And I loved the story it carried — the heritage, the cool, the decades behind it. I wished someone had built one like it for a world like mine. One morning the quiet thought became a loud one. Why should I be living with this? Why should anyone like me have to?
That question is why THUUN exists.
THE STANDARD
None of it was off the shelf.
I am not from the footwear industry — I am from the segment that has lived this compromise for years. The workday deserved a standard, and didn't have one. So before the first sketch, we wrote down what a shoe for this day would have to clear: fit, heat, the roads, the hours on your feet, and materials that earn their place over years, not seasons.
Fit, we did not have to invent. India now has its own footwear sizing system — the Bha system, developed by CLRI (Central Leather Research Institute) from the measurements of more than a lakh of Indian feet. It is available to the whole industry. We may be among the first to build on it. Our first silhouette called Senna1 is being developed on it — a last shaped for Indian feet, not a Western one sized up and hoped for.
The rest, no one had a standard for — so we are building it ourselves. The heat. The hours on your feet. What a sole has to do across a full day in this climate, not a morning in a cooler one. That part is ours, and it is the harder part. Some of it we can already measure. Some we are still proving — and where the data isn't closed, we say so plainly.
So that the shoe fits the foot — not the other way around.
The workday is longer than any of these shoes were built for. It runs across the whole of your life, not just your work — and no one had engineered a shoe to its level. Not adapted a running shoe. Not dressed up a fashion shoe. Not crossbred a sneaker. Not modernised a formal. Built for it. From scratch. For the Indian workday. On Indian feet. In Indian conditions.
That is what THUUN is. Not a better version of what exists. A different brief entirely.
Nishant Prabhu
Founder
Only when it matters.