Every so often a product refuses to behave like a product. The Gully Labs Buransh Red — sold officially as the Gully Number 001 × Aryan Katoch — is one of those. On the surface it is a sneaker: leather, laces, a rubber sole, a price tag. Look closer and it becomes something stranger and more stubborn — a love letter to the Himalayas, stitched panel by panel in festival colour, and worn on your feet like a piece of the hills themselves.
It is loud. It is unapologetically red. And that is entirely the point.
A shoe woven from a Himachali cap
The heart of the Buransh Red is fabric you have almost certainly seen before, even if you have never set foot in Himachal Pradesh. Its bright geometric weave is lifted straight from the traditional Kullu cap — the topi that crowns heads at weddings, fairs and festivals across the state, and whose bands of colour are instantly recognisable as “mountain.” Gully Labs did not print an imitation of it. They used the real woven Kullu textile, running it across the sneaker’s key panels so the craft is load-bearing, not decorative.
That single decision changes the whole object. Most sneakers borrow a colourway or a graphic and call it a “collab.” This one borrows a living craft tradition and rebuilds a modern silhouette around it. The result is what the brand happily calls a maximalist shoe — a celebration of colour and individuality rather than an exercise in restraint.
The details reward a second look. The tongue is the showpiece: a layered, geometric fabric shroud designed to stand tall and anchor the shoe’s handmade identity, so your eye goes there first. Sitting over the laces is a small removable anklet — a nod to the ornamentation of traditional Kullvi ethnic dress, the kind of quiet flourish that turns a costume into an heirloom. Even the side trail is stitched together from canvas strips rather than moulded or glued, a construction choice that keeps the whole thing feeling built by hand. Nothing here is accidental. Every element is rooted somewhere real in the folklore, dress and colour of the western Himalayas.
What “Buransh” actually means
If you grew up in the hills, the name lands before the design does. Buransh is the flame-red rhododendron that erupts across Himalayan slopes each spring, turning entire hillsides scarlet for a few weeks a year. It is the flower pressed into tangy squash sold at roadside stalls, the one that shows up in hill songs and grandmother stories, a small seasonal miracle that locals measure the year by.
Naming a bold red sneaker after it is a neat piece of storytelling. The shoe is not just “red” — it is that red, the specific, defiant crimson of a flower that blooms where the air is thin and the winters are long. It is heritage rendered in pigment, and it makes the case that mountain culture does not need to be softened or muted to sit in a contemporary wardrobe. It can arrive at full saturation and still belong.
The musician behind the design
The Buransh Red is not a marketing team’s idea of Himachal. It is one Himachali’s idea of home. The design belongs to Aryan Katoch, a musician whose work is steeped in the landscapes of the mountains he comes from. His music already carries the hills; the sneaker simply moves that feeling from the ear to the foot. The pitch was straightforward and heartfelt — take the fabric, the flower and the folklore of Himachal and turn them into something you can lace up and walk out the door in. Mountain pride, made wearable.
Part of something bigger: the “Karwaan” drop
The Buransh Red did not arrive alone. It was the anchor of Karwaan, a limited “Community Drop” that Gully Labs unveiled in late November 2025 and has described as its most intimate release yet. Rather than a conventional product launch, Karwaan was built as a tribute to the specific people, places and memories that shaped the brand — three one-off pairs, each translating a real person’s world into a shoe.
Alongside the Buransh Red sat two companion stories. The GL001 Khoj Green was inspired by a person named Sathvik and began, of all things, as a birthday wish; it reworks the vibrant muggu (rangoli) floor patterns of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh into a sneaker built around the spirit of adventure. The GL002 Aangan Blue drew on the handmade calm of a homestay called Ghar 1964 in Shoja — a cosy indoor mule in sky-toned suede with a soft fur lining, made for people who find their peace in quiet corners rather than crowded rooms.
Put together, the three pairs argued a single idea: identity is handmade. Each shoe holds a lived emotion and a fragment of cultural memory. For a brand that has always sold stories as much as sneakers, opening those personal stories up to its community was, in its own words, the most honest way to honour them. The drop was released in limited numbers through the flagship store in Panchsheel Park, New Delhi and online — the kind of small-batch release that turns quickly into a collector’s item.
Who is Gully Labs, anyway?
To understand why a shoe like this exists, you have to understand the company that made it. Gully Labs was founded in August 2023 by two self-confessed sneakerheads: Arjun Singh, a former JP Morgan investment banker who spent years in Sydney, and Animesh Mishra, a former Bain consultant and Arjun’s college junior. The founding insight was almost embarrassingly simple. Coming back to India, Arjun noticed that everyone around him was lacing up Western designs — logos from overseas — while the country’s own extraordinary reserves of craft, colour and story showed up nowhere in the sneakers people actually wore.
So they set out to build the opposite: a label that was, in their favourite phrase, “unapologetically Indian.” Not Indian in the tired export-market sense of elephants and paisley, but Indian in its bones — sneakers that carried genuine local stories, executed at a standard that could stand next to the best in the world. The shoes are handcrafted from premium leather, branded in Devanagari script, and made in the brand’s own factory in Noida rather than farmed out to contract manufacturers. Their governing principle is craft over hype: no trend-chasing, every material intentional, every reference genuine rather than tokenistic.
The strategy has worked with unusual speed. Gully Labs walked into Shark Tank India Season 5 and walked out with a solo one-crore-rupee deal from Aman Gupta. It has raised roughly ₹8.7 crore in seed funding and, in January 2026, closed a Series A of around ₹26.5 crore (about $3 million) led by Saama Capital. It has been featured in Vogue, landed its founders on GQ‘s list of influential Indians, and collaborated with names as varied as Royal Enfield, CMF by Nothing, and sportswear brand Nivia. In under three years, a pair of “outsiders” to fashion built themselves a real seat at India’s cultural table.
Why the Gully Labs Buransh Red matters
Here is the quiet radicalism of the Gully Labs Buransh Red. For a long stretch, the Indian aspiration was to leave — to escape toward validation stamped somewhere else. Gully Labs is betting on a different aspiration entirely: a self-assured, homegrown confidence that no longer needs a foreign label to feel legitimate. The Buransh Red makes that argument in the most tangible way possible. It takes something a foreigner might exoticise — a hill cap, a red flower, a Himachali folk tradition — and hands it back to Indians not as a souvenir, but as streetwear worth owning.
Heritage, it turns out, does not need to be toned down to stay relevant. Sometimes it just needs to be worn.
The essentials
- Product: Gully Labs Buransh Red — officially Gully Number 001 × Aryan Katoch (part of the Karwaan Community Drop)
- Fabric & design: Authentic woven Kullu textile across key panels, layered geometric tongue, removable anklet over the laces, canvas-strip trail
- Price: Around ₹9,490 (frequently discounted, sometimes ~25% off; the international store lists it near $205)
- Availability: gullylabs.com, global.gullylabs.com, select retailers, and the New Delhi flagship — offered for both men and women
- Reception: Rated 5.0 and flagged as a bestseller, though its limited, community-drop nature means stock and pricing move quickly
Prices, discounts and availability shift over time — it’s worth checking Gully Labs’ own site for the current listing before you buy.
