How Abhinav Pathak is betting beyond luggage with Escape Plan

If he gets it right, Escape Plan won’t be a luggage brand. If he gets it wrong, that’s exactly what it will become.

On paper, the trajectory looks familiar. A young founder. A second act after a clean exit. A fast-growing consumer brand riding India’s D2C wave. In under a year, Escape Plan—a travel gear platform—has pushed towards a ₹400 crore annualised run rate, scaled across channels, and found early product-market fit in a crowded category.

But that’s also the trap. Because Abhinav Pathak isn’t trying to win luggage. He is trying to escape it.

The idea took shape only after he had seen both ends of the spectrum—building a company from scratch in his early twenties, and then stepping inside scale at Amazon after selling his first venture. The lesson wasn’t about product or brand as much as it was about how markets actually consolidate. Categories, he realised, don’t break open just because someone builds a better product. They break when someone controls how that product reaches the consumer.

In India’s D2C boom, that distinction is easy to miss. Brands launch fast, scale faster, and crowd timelines with newness. But most of them, Pathak believes, hit the same ceiling—strong on brand, limited on distribution, and vulnerable to replication. “The game is not brand,” he says. “The game is distribution.”

That belief shapes everything Escape Plan is building, and everything it risks becoming.

That belief didn’t come from theory. It was built over time.

From Perpule to Amazon: How Abhinav Pathak Built and Exited His First Venture

Pathak didn’t start here. He grew up in Lucknow, in a household where stability wasn’t guaranteed and resilience wasn’t optional. His father passed away when he was still in primary school. His mother worked. His grandmother stepped in. There was structure, discipline, and a quiet expectation to figure things out.

That instinct showed up early.

In 2011, after years of chasing the IIT track, he missed the branch he wanted. The gap was small. The outcome wasn’t. He moved to National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal, instead, picked mechanical engineering, and realised within weeks that it wasn’t where the best opportunities were. The market, at the time, was clear about what it valued. Computer science opened doors. Mechanical didn’t.

He didn’t switch, though. He pushed.

Companies like Goldman Sachs weren’t hiring from his stream. So, he argued his way in—first with the placement cell, then with the recruiters. “If you don’t think I’m good enough, let me fail your test. But don’t stop me from applying,” he recalls. He wrote emails. Followed up. Kept at it until the doors opened.

He cleared the test. The job came with everything it was supposed to—pay, prestige, a stint between Bengaluru and New York. And then, 14 months in, he walked away.

In 2016, that wasn’t the default choice it might seem today. Startups were visible, but not inevitable. The safer path was still clear. Pathak chose otherwise, drawn less by a specific idea and more by a way of operating. “You can only take a limited number of bets,” he says. “Over time, you learn what kind of outcomes those bets can create.”

The first one came from what he had seen up close—self-checkout systems in the US, layered with a technology lens. It was a narrow idea, built with a small team, in a market that was still forming. But it scaled.

That company, Perpule, built a cloud-based point-of-sale system used by offline retailers across categories—from electronics and fashion to food and groceries. Its clients included large chains like Big Bazaar, Curefit, and 24SEVEN. At a time when physical retail was beginning to digitise, Perpule positioned itself as the layer enabling that shift.

The business scaled quickly. And then, he sold.

In March 2021, Amazon acquired the company in an all-cash deal reportedly worth ₹107.6 crore, with the total value expected to go up further with employee payouts. The acquisition plugged directly into Amazon’s push to deepen its footprint among offline retailers, with Perpule’s technology powering initiatives like Smart Stores.

The exit was profitable, but more importantly, it was unemotional. “The business is bigger than me, and I am bigger than the business,” he says. If a partner could accelerate outcomes faster than he could alone, the decision was straightforward.

The Last-mover Advantage: How Escape Plan is Rethinking the Luggage Market

Following the acquisition of Perpule by Amazon, Pathak joined the tech giant and spent two years working across business and product leadership roles. Inside Amazon, he saw the other side—how scale actually works. Systems, processes, distribution at a level most early founders never experience first-hand. It changed how he thought about building, and more importantly, about what separates companies that grow from those that endure.

By the time he stepped out in 2023, the next move wasn’t obvious. He didn’t rush back in. For nearly two years, he studied categories, tracked outcomes, and looked for patterns.

What he found was consistent. Across consumer markets in India, the winners were rarely the newest brands. They were the ones that controlled reach. Distribution, not differentiation, was the real moat. That insight would shape what came next. And why he chose to enter late.

By the time Pathak returned to building, the luggage market didn’t look like an obvious opening.

The incumbents were entrenched. Legacy brands like VIP and Safari still dominated mindshare and distribution. At the other end, a new crop of D2C startups—sleek, design-led, digitally native—had already claimed the narrative. Mokobara, Uppercase, Assembly. The category was no longer empty. It was crowded, noisy, and increasingly competitive.

Today, the new-age players are not small anymore.

Peak XV-backed Mokobara, for instance, has scaled rapidly, with revenue rising to ₹230 crore in FY25 from ₹53 crore just two years earlier. Growth has come fast—nearly doubling year-on-year—but so have the pressures, with losses widening to ₹10 crore.

The playbook is visible. Which is precisely why Pathak waited.

There is a line he comes back to often, drawn from Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One: first movers don’t always win. In fact, the advantage often lies with the last mover—the one who enters once the playbook is visible, the mistakes are exposed, and the edges are clearer. “I knew hundreds of people would be doing this,” he says. “But I will be the last guy.”

The decision wasn’t about building a better suitcase. It was about rejecting how most of the category was being built.

Over two years of research, one pattern stood out. Across consumer brands in India, product innovation didn’t hold for long. Designs were copied. Features replicated. Pricing matched. What looked differentiated at launch rarely stayed that way. “The game is not brand. The game is not product,” Pathak says. “You will get copied.”

What endured instead was reach. The companies that scaled weren’t just building brands; they were building distribution—across channels, formats, and price points. Online, offline, marketplaces, retail, partnerships. Depth, not just visibility.

In luggage, that gap was still open. There were strong brands. There were large incumbents. But there wasn’t a single, dominant, multi-brand platform built around travel as a category. Not luggage as a product, but travel as an ecosystem—bags, accessories, mobility, and eventually, service.

Scaling Fast, Thinking Bigger: Inside Escape Plan’s Bet Beyond Luggage

That reframing became the bet. Investors are buying into that breadth. For Fireside Ventures, one of Escape Plan’s backers, the appeal lies in how the company is approaching the category—not as a narrow product play, but as a layered consumer business.

“Escape Plan is disrupting the travel accessories category by building across every meaningful consumer price point,” says Vinay Singh, co-founder and Partner at Fireside Ventures. This combination of category breadth, consumer understanding, and scalable retail capability positions Escape Plan strongly for long-term growth, he underlines.

That’s the upside. The ambition runs deeper. Escape Plan wouldn’t just sell luggage. It would try to own the journey around it. The model was closer to what Decathlon had done for sports, or Nykaa for beauty—aggregate, curate, and control distribution at scale. Build across channels. Stay close to the consumer across use cases. Expand beyond a single product category before the market defines you by it. “Looking ahead, we see Escape Plan evolving into a complete travel platform. We are actively exploring adjacent categories across travel accessories, mobility products, outdoor and adventure gear, and other solutions that naturally fit into a traveller’s journey,” says Pathak.

It’s a bigger ambition. But it’s also a harder one. Because from the outside, none of that is visible yet. What the market sees today is simpler: a fast-growing luggage brand, competing in a familiar playbook, scaling quickly on the back of design, pricing, and online traction.

Pathak knows that perception. And he knows how quickly it can stick.

Escape Plan didn’t wait for perfect clarity before moving. The company raised capital before launch, went live in May 2025, and started building across channels almost immediately. Marketplaces, its own website, early retail presence—the distribution stack came together fast, even as the team was still learning the basics of the category.

None of them had built in luggage before. “How do you store it, ship it, sell it—everything was new,” Pathak says. The early weeks were messy. Operations had to be figured out in real time. Supply chains stitched together. Vendors tested, replaced, reworked.

But the learning curve was steep and short. Within weeks, the system began to stabilise. Within months, it began to scale.

By the end of its first full year, Escape Plan was clocking roughly ₹175 crore in revenue, with an annualised run rate pushing towards ₹400 crore. Losses, Pathak says, are contained around 5%. The trajectory, at least on paper, looks controlled.

Now, this brings us to an obvious question: is it moving too fast?

Pathak doesn’t see it that way. “If the variance was 100%, we would be scared,” he says. “But this is within range. There is a method to the madness,” he adds.

The speed, in other words, is not accidental. It’s engineered.

That shows up in how the company thinks about growth. Targets exist, but they aren’t the focus. Inputs are. Conversion rates. Supply chain efficiency. Availability across channels. The levers that compound quietly, rather than the outputs that get celebrated. “If inputs improve, outputs will follow,” he says.

Beyond Luggage or Defined by It? The Real Test for Escape Plan

It’s a way of operating that keeps the company grounded even as the numbers climb. But it also reflects something else: a deliberate attempt to avoid the traps that come with early success.

Because speed, by itself, is not the risk Pathak worries about. If anything, it’s the opposite. “I fear irrelevance,” he says. Success, in his view, carries its own blind spots. Companies begin to believe their own narratives. Founders assume they are right. The distance from the market widens, slowly at first, then suddenly.

And then, someone else walks in and does it better. It’s a pattern he has seen across categories—companies that scale quickly, only to plateau when they stop questioning themselves. That is the outcome he is trying to stay ahead of. Not failure. Not competition. But the far more ordinary possibility of becoming predictable. And in a category where most brands eventually start to look the same, which may be the hardest thing to avoid.

The opportunity is clear. So are the constraints. Marketing and branding experts see both playing out.

“Escape Plan’s early growth is impressive,” says Ashita Aggarwal, professor of marketing at SP Jain Institute of Management & Research. The brand is among the faster-scaling players in this category, which suggests they’ve found initial product-market fit and distribution traction. In consumer businesses, a brand without distribution is just vanity. “When you add distribution muscle, it becomes a real business,” she adds.

The last-mover advantage also works in the favour of Escape Plan. They’ve had the benefit of watching what has worked—and what hasn’t—especially with younger consumers like the Gen Z.

The real challenge, however, is more internal than external. If a large share of revenue continues to come from luggage, the market will define them that way, regardless of their broader ambition. That creates a positioning tension.

Beyond that, sustaining growth will be key. This is not a sprint. Categories like this tend to have multiple winners. The question is whether Escape Plan can find and hold its space while expanding beyond its core without diluting what’s already working.”

The next phase of Escape Plan won’t be decided by how many suitcases it sells. It will be decided by how far it can move beyond them.

The roadmap is already stretching in that direction—deeper retail presence, more touch points across travel corridors, a wider portfolio of products that extend beyond luggage into accessories and mobility. Over time, Pathak wants to push further—towards becoming a single point of interaction for travel itself.

That’s the ambition.

But the risk sits right next to it. Because categories have a way of locking companies in early. What you scale on becomes what you’re known for. What you’re known for becomes what you’re expected to do. And over time, what you’re expected to do becomes hard to break away from.

Escape Plan, today, is scaling on luggage. That’s both its engine and its constraint. If the company continues to grow at its current pace, the label will only harden. Customers will come for suitcases. Competitors will position against it as a luggage brand. Distribution channels will optimise for that identity. At some point, expanding beyond it won’t just be a strategy shift. It will be a repositioning.

And repositioning, especially at scale, is rarely easy.

Pathak is aware of that tension. It shows up in how he talks about the company—not in terms of categories, but in terms of use cases. Travel, not luggage. Movement, not products.

But clarity inside the company doesn’t automatically translate to clarity outside it. That gap—between what Escape Plan is becoming and what the market believes it is—is where the next phase will play out.

For now, the numbers are moving in the right direction. The system is holding. The bet is still early. But the question that hangs over it hasn’t changed. Escape Plan looks like a fast-growing luggage brand. Pathak is betting it won’t stay one. Whether he can pull that off will decide what the company ultimately becomes.