How XYXX uses a ₹999 five-pack to sell a whole wardrobe

Category introduction

Innerwear in India is a large, slow category that one company has owned for thirty years. Research firm IMARC puts the market at about USD 10.9 billion in 2025. The incumbent is Jockey, run in India by Page Industries, which reported revenue of ₹5,247 crore for FY26 and sells through more than 100,000 retail doors and 1,500 of its own stores.

Jockey wins on reach. It is in the shop near you, and it does not use Indian celebrity faces to get there. Its recent work is about holding on to younger buyers: the JKY Groove athleisure line for Gen Z, launched with a digital-first, creator-led campaign, and “Take It Outside” for outerwear.

A newer set of brands cannot match that shelf space, so they compete online. XYXX, FREECULTR, DaMENSCH and Bummer all sell softer fabric (modal and micro-modal) at a higher price than the mass market, mostly through their own sites and marketplaces. For them the Meta ad, not the shop shelf, is where the customer first meets the brand. That makes their ad libraries a fair record of their strategy.

Brand introduction

XYXX was started in Surat in 2017 by Yogesh Kabra. It began with men's underwear and now sells loungewear, tees, pants, outerwear and an athleisure line called CREW. It reported revenue of ₹191.8 crore for FY25, up 46% on the year before. Cricketer KL Rahul has been an investor and brand ambassador since 2022. Unlike most online-first rivals it has also gone offline, into more than 20,000 multi-brand outlets.

So XYXX is no longer an innerwear brand in the narrow sense. It is a men's wardrobe brand that happens to be best known for underwear. That one fact explains most of its advertising.

Summary

XYXX does not advertise its catalogue evenly. It advertises one offer hard and lets that offer open the door to everything else. Five undies for ₹999 works out at ₹200 a piece, the lowest of the three brands we compared, and it is an easy thing to say yes to. Once someone has bought, the rest of the range is sold to a customer the brand already knows.

The second half of the plan is who makes the ads. A library of 2,282 ads goes stale fast if one team has to produce all of it. XYXX gets round this by paying creators to make reels, publishing those reels on its own Instagram grid, and then running the same reels as paid ads. The creator post stops being a one-off campaign and becomes stock the brand can keep using.

Problem statement and objective

This is our reading of the ads, not a brief XYXX has published. The problem looks like this. A brand with a wide catalogue needs a lot of first-time buyers, and it needs them cheaply. Parkas and joggers are a hard first purchase from a brand you have not tried. Underwear at ₹200 a piece is an easy one.

The objective that follows is simple: get as many men as possible to make a small first order, with a message that needs no explaining, and keep the ads fresh enough that people do not tune them out.

Execution: what the ads actually do

We decoded 100 of XYXX's live ads on 9–10 September 2026 and asked the same five questions of each: what job the ad does, what it argues, how it is made, who seems to be talking, and where the click lands.

One page takes most of the clicks

63 of the 100 ads land on the ₹999 five-pack page. Of the other 37, vests take 13, pants 6, tees 6, pyjamas 3, boxers 3 and outerwear 3. The last 3 land elsewhere. That split is the strategy in one line: most of the money on the front door, a smaller share on what comes after.

Price and comfort, said equally often

44% of the sampled ads make a price argument and 44% make a comfort argument. 38% name the fabric. Only 3% of FREECULTR's ads mention price at all. XYXX can lead on price because the sum holds up: ₹200 a piece really is the cheapest of the three.

Many ideas, each run thin

The 100 ads carry 54 different pieces of copy. Apart from the automated product feed, which appears 32 times, no single idea runs more than three times. The ads that repeat most all sell the same pack in different voices:

Source: Meta Ad Library, India, read 9–10 September 2026. 100 of XYXX's 2,282 live ads. All five rows send the click to the same ₹999 page.

A third of the ads are a creator talking

33% of the sample is creator-made footage with the creator's own words, 32% is brand video and 35% is the automated feed. There are no brand stills at all. 27% of the ads read like a person talking in the first person, because a person is.

The Instagram side shows how these are sourced. We found 64 creator posts tagging XYXX since September 2025, from 46 creators. All 64 are reels, all 64 are co-published on XYXX's own grid, and 33 carry a paid-partnership label. Of the last 60 posts on the brand's own account, 85% are collaborations.

Creators sell the wardrobe; ads sell the underwear

79 of the 100 sampled ads send the click to an innerwear page: the ₹999 five-pack (63), vests (13) and boxers (3). The creator posts are mostly about everything else: denim jackets, half-zips, hoodies, polos. So the two layers do different jobs. Ads bring in the first order. Creators show the buyer what else there is.

The one big exception proves the point. In June 2026 XYXX released “My Eyes Are Up Here” with creator Vir Saini, a role-reversal sketch for its Invisible Vest. Trade press reported over 5 million organic views in 48 hours. In our read it holds 89% of all the engagement XYXX's creator posts earned in twelve months. One post carried the year.

What the competition is doing

Two rivals sell almost the same product to almost the same man. Neither copies XYXX, and each has a good reason not to.

Source: Meta Ad Library and Instagram, read 9–10 September 2026. Prices from each brand's product pages on 10 September 2026.

FREECULTR: one range, argued on fabric

FREECULTR is about a tenth of XYXX's size, so it does not spread itself. 99 of its 100 sampled ads land on one range, Everyday Expressions. It costs more per piece, so it barely mentions price and talks about fabric instead: 63% of its ads make a fabric claim. 73% are written to make you replace what you already own (“Still wearing uncomfortable underwear?”). It also prints a weekday on each waistband, so a single photo explains why you would buy seven. And a third of its ads land on the women's range. Neither rival sent an ad to a women's page in our sample.

Bummer: ideas instead of media

Bummer has 23 live ads in total, and 20 of them are an automated product feed. That is what a ₹10.7 crore brand can sensibly keep running. The work happens elsewhere: giveaways with other brands, a beach run staged in its boxers, founder panels, trade coverage. None of its 63 tagged posts carries a paid-partnership label. Its few written ads are jokes, such as a vest “made for walking around the house aimlessly on a Sunday afternoon”.

And Jockey

Jockey plays a different game. Its CMO, Nihal Rajan, has said the brand spends 3 to 3.5% of net revenue on marketing and deploys it by objective, across outdoor, TV, digital and creators. Its edge is distribution, not a single online offer. But it is moving the same way as the newer brands on one point: its Gen Z line was launched digital-first and led by creators. We have not decoded Jockey's ad library yet, so we make no claim about what its Meta ads look like.

What other brands can take from this

• Pick a front door. One offer, one page, one number. It only works if the number is honestly the best in the category. A brand without that maths needs a different door, not a copy of this one.
• Treat creator posts as stock. Co-publish them on your own grid and run the good ones as ads. XYXX does this for a third of its sample; FREECULTR for 4 ads in 100; Bummer for none.
• Give ads and creators different jobs. XYXX's ads sell the first order and its creators sell the rest of the wardrobe.
• Expect one post to carry the year. For XYXX and Bummer a single post holds about nine-tenths of creator engagement. Plan for many attempts, not one big bet.
• Look at who nobody is talking to. Only FREECULTR sent ads to a women's range.