It all began at Sunburn, the electronic music festival that subsumes every facet of Goa for about a week in December. Devarsh and Akash, local twenty-somethings, were there to celebrate music, like thousands of other young people from all over the world. It was a heady experience marred only by the state of their shoes, which by the end of the first night were thoroughly caked in the red mud that Goa’s temporary festival grounds produce in prodigious volume.
The shoes weren’t really expensive, the kind you pick up at Westside for under a thousand rupees, but they were the only shoes they had. There was no money for replacements. Their only option for clean shoes before the festival reopened the next day was to do it themselves.
So they did. And then they kept going. If they had this problem, others did too. They invested ₹5,000, just about enough for cleaning liquid and brushes and not much else. Before Clean Kicks had a storefront, they had Devarsh’s bathroom. They commandeered all their neighbours’ shoes, filmed the before-and-after as they cleaned them up, and posted the videos to Instagram. People started sharing the clips. Shoes arrived faster than they could clean them. There were shoes everywhere, lining every wall of Devarsh’s home. They scrubbed at night and delivered in the morning. Devarsh’s parents watched from the sidelines, horrified and uncomprehending.
They were twenty-five. Neither had used their degrees for anything resembling this. They knew nothing about leather or textiles. They weren’t even sneakerheads. What they did know was that they wanted to build something. Anything, really. The specific business mattered less than the act of building one. Shoes just happened to be the problem that presented itself.
What they did not anticipate was the social baggage that came with it. In India, handling another person’s shoes sits inside a social hierarchy that has nothing to do with hygiene. It is a centuries-old ordering of who does this kind of work and who doesn’t. Nobody talks about it in those terms, but everyone is familiar with the lines. Neither saw what they were doing as an act of defiance. Nor do they care to frame it as such. They are painfully aware of the judgment. Six months after they started, a staff member they had hired resigned. His parents had discovered what he was doing. Ghar aja, they told him. Come home. They were paying him more than they earned themselves, but the social stigma far outweighed the salary.
Even their own families had lots to say. Get a proper job worthy of your degree, something with a recognisable shape, they were told. But the shoes kept arriving, and the business, first called Shoe Basket, later renamed Clean Kicks, was already making a kind of sense that a “proper job” never would.
lessons from leather
No formal training exists for what Clean Kicks does. Suede responds differently to canvas. Patent leather and nubuck need entirely different approaches. Learning which products damage which materials took two years of trial and error, and the only way to learn was to get it wrong.
They honed their learning from mistakes. And accidents. Early on, while transporting a customer’s Nike shoes by motorbike, they had an accident. One shoe hit the ground, leaving it scuffed. The guilt, they say, was different from anything a service mistake would have produced. Their utter panic became the origin of their restoration work. If they could repair what had been damaged, they could offer more than cleaning. That single accident opened up something else entirely.
Sachi, a long-standing customer whose father owns a pair of Loro Piana shoes made from materials too delicate for repeated chemical exposure, is awed by their meticulous record-keeping. “They know how many times a particular pair has been serviced.”
“More than brand, customers want a trust factor,” Akash says. Whether someone is comfortable handing over shoes or a bag worth several months’ salary is a question Clean Kicks has to answer every day.
Hardware is sourced internationally. Leather and cleaning supplies come from within India. The confidence to accept a Gucci bag came from word of mouth, which in Goa is how trust moves. Pranjal, a schoolmate-turned-customer, recommends them to anyone he meets who has a pair of shoes or a bag worth looking after.
the longer life of things
Sustainability, they say quite candidly, was never the plan. They just wanted to clean and restore much-loved things. The sustainability crept in sideways. Cleaning solutions are biodegradable. Water use is minimal. Plastic bags have made way for reusable cloth because they feel right. Without ever planning to, they have organically built a business with sustainability hardwired into its DNA. Though it hasn’t yet made its way into their storytelling.
The bigger thing, the thing they had not found language for until someone pointed it out, is what happens to the shoes after they come back.
Sheetal, one of their earliest customers, keeps a pair of Converse sneakers in regular rotation with Clean Kicks. Before she met them, she loathed having to trash shoes when they wore down from “walking everywhere her feet took her”. Since Clean Kicks, her much-loved Converse have been granted a fresh lease on life. Their service offering, she says, is not the cleaning. It is that she gets to keep wearing something she loves longer.
Patagonia built Worn Wear around this idea. Repair what you already own and keep it going as long as you can. Clean Kicks arrived at the same place without knowing Patagonia had a name for it. Two young men who could not afford a second pair of shoes at a music festival are now, without quite realising it, running a sustainability business.
the promises we make
In Goa, where a plumber’s promise to come tomorrow can mean anytime over the next six weeks, or never, Clean Kicks operates on a different clock. One phone call, and the shoes are collected the next day. It’s an ingrained reflex that sets them apart. Sachi describes their punctuality as the credibility engine in a market where follow-through is rare, and trust is earned slowly.
The commitment is not abstract. They still do their own pickups and deliveries. They still adjust their schedules around customers, not the other way around. Every rupee of profit goes back into the business. They do not spend on lifestyle. The bathroom where it all started has been replaced by two stores and more than a thousand customers, but the daily rhythm of the work has not changed much since the beginning.
They are twenty-seven. That they did this in a trade most people in their world would not touch makes it hard to compare to much else.
They finish each other’s sentences, often arriving at the same answer before either has properly started. They want Clean Kicks in every major Indian city. Mumbai, Pune, wherever the market is. “Like McDonald’s,” they say, and it does not sound entirely like they’re joking.
the question unanswered
The thing that built Clean Kicks, the personal, show-up-at-your-door commitment, the willingness to pay out of pocket if they damage something, is also what’s most at risk if the business grows the way they want it to.
At a thousand customers, the two of them can hold the standard. Ten thousand, across five cities, and they cannot be in every room. They will not franchise, they say. Every store, every hire, stays in-house, under their supervision, so they can keep their promises.
The franchise model would solve the problem by distributing it. Company-owned stores staffed by people who care the way the founders do is a harder path, and one they do not yet have a map for.
“If tomorrow we spoil an LV pair also, now I’m happily ready to pay for the pair,” Akash says. What may seem like bravado is the standard they are determined to maintain, even as they scale. Personal liability for every item that passes through their hands. Whether that standard can survive being handed to someone else is something they haven’t worked out yet.
They are working on faster turnaround, shift systems, and an app eventually. But the deeper problem, translating a founder’s instinct into an organisation’s culture, is one that businesses far older than theirs have struggled with and mostly not solved.
But all of that can wait. There are two stores in Goa and a thousand customers who get to hold on to things they love a little longer. For now, this will do.
