Indian D2C Holds 20.7% of the Amazon Men’s Innerwear Shelf

First, what a unit is here

A unit on this shelf is one listing sold, not one garment. 417 of the 584 listings are multipacks, at a median of two pieces, so the garment count is somewhere near 643,000 a month. Revenue is unaffected, being pack price multiplied by packs sold, but the unit count is not comparable with a beauty shelf, where a unit is one bottle.

We put this first because it is the figure most likely to be quoted out of context, and because it is the kind of definition that decides whether two numbers may sit in the same table.

D2C was supposed to lose this one

Across the beauty shelves we have measured, the pattern has been consistent: Indian D2C takes more than half of sunscreen, which buyers research and choose for themselves, and under a tenth of baby skincare, where a paediatrician usually ends the discussion. Innerwear is neither. It is bought on habit, at a low price, without comparison.

Indian D2C holds 20.7% of it.

The top row needs its own name. Jockey in India is Page Industries, an Indian listed company holding the exclusive licence. Van Heusen is Aditya Birla and U.S. Polo Assn. is Arvind. These are neither foreign brands operating here nor D2C challengers: they are international labels run by Indian incumbents, and folding them into either neighbouring row would change the headline.

Jockey is fine. The legacy manufacturers are not.

Jockey holds 48.2% of this shelf and discounts a median of 5%. Every other brand in the top six discounts between 8% and 35%. Whatever is happening to Indian innerwear, it is not happening to the leader.

Lux, Dixcy Scott, VIP, Dollar, Rupa, Ramraj, Amul Comfy and Euro clothed Indian men for forty years, and most of their parent companies are listed. Twelve brands from eight of those companies hold 5.4% of the shelf between them.

XYXX earns ₹19.9 crore here. DaMENSCH earns ₹17.0 crore. All twelve legacy brands together earn ₹10.2 crore. Either challenger, on its own, out-earns the entire legacy group.

And they took it at a premium, not a discount

Amazon publishes a per-piece price on multipacks, which is the only sound way to set a three-pack against a single-piece listing.

DaMENSCH charges ₹293 a piece and XYXX ₹250, against ₹116 for Lux Cozi and ₹71 for Amul Comfy. D2C is undercutting nobody. It charges two to four times what the legacy brands charge per piece and takes share anyway.

The four cheapest brands per piece hold 0.5% of the shelf between them. On this shelf, cheapest is not a position.

The full shelf

Highlighted rows are Indian D2C brands. The top three take 70.3% between them, which makes this a far more concentrated shelf than sunscreen at 22.1%, and a little more concentrated than baby skincare at 58.5%.

Three things to take from it

A default is harder to kill than a price. Jockey did not lose share to the challengers. The middle did — companies that held distribution for decades and never gave a buyer a reason to prefer them.

Deep discounting is a symptom, not a strategy. Every brand discounting between 44% and 71% sits in the bottom third of the table.

A low-research category is not automatically closed to a challenger. That is the part of our own reading this shelf corrects. Research intensity sorts the beauty shelves; it does not sort this one, and we would rather record that than tidy it away.

Method, and what this is not

This shelf was defined category-first. We took four searches Amazon merchandises for this category, three pages each, and harvested 1,876 distinct organic products. The 600 highest-revenue listings were then opened individually to verify each brand from Amazon’s own "Visit the … Store" link. Fifteen came back as gym vests and stringers and were excluded. The pinned query list is the shelf definition: change it and you have measured a different shelf.

GMV is derived, and on apparel it is a deeper floor than on beauty. Units × current price × 12, with Amazon’s banded velocity counted at the bottom of its band. A single apparel style carries a median of about 49 listings by size and colour, so volume is spread thinly across them and most carry no published velocity at all. Velocity coverage here is 1,103 of 1,876 products. Any brand-to-brand comparison not captured to equal depth is measuring capture, not performance.

It is GMV, not revenue. What buyers pay before Amazon’s commission, fulfilment and returns. No brand receives this number.

Amazon only, and offline is large here. Innerwear sells heavily through general trade, which this method cannot see at all.

Reviews pool to the parent listing; velocity does not. Read together they would say something about a catalogue that is not true, so they are reported separately.

Ownership is hand-classified, and five brands worth 2.4% could not be confirmed from the listing. They are marked unverified rather than assigned to a group.

One shelf, one day — 2 September 2026. Every figure is reproducible from the same public pages. If you believe one is wrong, we would genuinely like to know which.

Related measurements

The shelves this one is read against are sunscreen, where Indian D2C holds 51.5%, and baby skincare, where it holds 9.8%. The full library of shelf reports is at impuls8.com/reports.

This is one category on one platform on one day. The same method runs on any category you name, across Amazon, Flipkart, Nykaa, Myntra, AJIO and quick commerce, and on a cycle so you can see what moved: who cut price, who launched, who quietly withdrew. If you sell in a category and want it measured with your brand and your competitors in it, that is what we do for enterprise clients.