The Truth About “Made in India”

Groundbreakin’ this week features Ajaaz Rasheed, principal designer and co-founder at Ludic, a footwear-first lifestyle brand out of Ahmedabad. He also once made the top eight at Penny Academy’s World Sneaker Championship, and he checks his own foot size against nobody else’s because, in his words, “I don’t have a wide foot for that matter.”

He grew up in Kerala wanting to design cars. Then he found out there’s something called product design, wore his parents down about the risk of it, and landed at design school, where footwear wasn’t even a specialization. It became one anyway, mostly by accident, mostly through Instagram DMs and being at the right after-party with the right people. Seven years, two companies, and one destroyed set of Nike molds later, he’s trying to build a shoe brand India can point to and say: designed here, on purpose.

• Why Nike quietly exited manufacturing in India and paid to physically destroy the evidence.

• The blunt financial test Ajaaz runs before he’ll design a shoe brand for anyone.

• What Fila taught him that design school never could and why he calls Ludic “learning judgment.”

• How a wide-fit slider became a 65,000-pair-a-year problem solved by actually looking at Indian feet.

• Why owning a mold matters more than owning a logo.

• The fictional bunker-dwelling world built just to sell a shoe and why going viral was never the goal.

• The “Made in India” label, he thinks, is mostly a scam, and the one part of it he still believes in.

The Molds Nike Paid to Destroy
Ajaaz’s first real factory visits happened at Fila, tagging along with the footwear developer just to see how things actually got made. One of those factories used to produce for Nike. Used to.
“They had spent around 50 lakhs on a laser machine to destroy the molds into four. So the factory can’t use it. That’s the amount of mistrust they have in Indian factories.”

Nike didn’t just leave. It paid extra to make sure nothing was left behind that could leak back into the market. That’s a verdict, and it’s the exact backdrop every Indian footwear brand is silently designing against.

The Art of Saying No
Two years working with a factory system taught Ajaaz something design school never covers: the gap between a sketch and a shelf is where the real design happens.
So now, when someone comes to him wanting a shoe brand, he doesn’t start with mood boards.
“I’ll ask you: how much, let’s say, bank balance do you have? You might say 1 CR. Like, put it into an FD. Chill.”

Eight out of ten times, the answer is no. Not because the idea is bad, but because most people asking for a designer actually just want a curator, someone to pick a mold from China and slap on a logo. Ajaaz has learned to tell the difference and to say so, even when it costs him the project.

Fila was School. Ludic is Practice
He put it simply: design college taught systems. Fila taught reality. Ludic is where the two collide, and he has to make the call himself.
“Fila was the learning ground, and Ludic is where I’m learning judgment.”

At Fila, briefs started with a price point, not a concept, which felt backwards to a design-school brain trained to start with the problem. It took a year of frustration before it clicked: the price *is* the problem. Everything he does at Ludic now runs through that same filter, just with nobody left to blame if it goes wrong.

Designing for Real Feet, Not Instagram
Ludic’s slider took a year and a half to make. The decision that shaped it was anatomical.
“The decision to make Ludic sliders a bit wide fit was based on the research and the knowledge of Indians having broad feet. We’ve been consuming western brands which are...”

Narrower is the unfinished thought. Ajaaz knew the risk: more exchanges, more replacements, more sizing conversations nobody wants to have. Then the number came in. 65,000 pairs in twelve months. The market had been waiting for someone to look at the foot first.

When Mold is Moat
Most young brands go to China, pick an open mold off a shelf, and print a logo on it. Ludic spent 50-60 lakhs upfront building its own tooling before it had any brand recognition to justify it. Ajaaz doesn’t see that as overspending. He sees it as the entire point.
“Toolings are basically your souls, right? Nike has Pegasus, Adidas has Boost and Puma has Nitro. These are all IPs. These are all things which compound value for a footwear business.”

Nobody can rip off a slider Ludic owns the mold for. That’s not branding. That’s a moat, built one expensive decision at a time.

Fuo, the World-Building Team
Every Ludic ad campaign is under pressure to perform the way performance marketing wants it to, chase the algorithm, chase the trend, chase the ROAS. Instead, Ajaaz and his in-house creative team built Fuo: a small, strange, bunker-dwelling world with its own odd characters, none of whom are obviously selling a shoe.

“We wanted to establish Future Works as a world rather than a product. The product comes from that world.”

It’s made to be recognizable campaign after campaign, even if that means the sales team occasionally asks why they’re not chasing the trend everyone else is chasing. Ajaaz’s answer to that pressure, in his own words, is to keep “grounding people”, reminding the team that consistency, not virality, is what makes a brand impossible to copy.

Ask Ajaaz what winning looks like, and he doesn’t reach for a revenue number. He reaches for a feeling, the one you get when a product you’ve used for three years suddenly goes out of stock.

“India should be known for modern footwear and modern product designs being built and designed in India, like how Apple is designed in California. It should be a thing.”

That’s the real ambition underneath everything Ludic is doing slowly and stubbornly, not to out-fund the well-capitalized brands chasing the same category, but to prove that a shoe engineered for an Indian foot, made with Indian-owned tooling, can still stand next to anything the West exports to us. Ajaaz is optimizing for the next decade and for what true vision looks like.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay Groundbreakin’.
—Dipaq