Akshat Jain

Engineering @razorpay | 🇮🇳 👨🏻‍💻 🏎️ 🏍️ 🎨 🌊

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@Hiteshdotcom After a while companies will realize that the average employee has become dumber with AI, which would have to be compensated by tokens cost, which would have to further be compensated by hiring more AND the quality still goes down!

[Raj Kunkolienkar @kunksed]

Birkenstock went from 1 India store in 2020 to more than 50 today. And that isn’t the victory it looks like.

It’s a distress signal.

Brands don’t walk into India when they’re winning in the West. They walk in when they’ve stopped winning. The Indian premium consumer has quietly become the last chapter in a lot of Western brand stories — and if you squint, you can see the pattern stretching back a decade.

Starbucks arrived here in 2012, seven years after US growth peaked and “mall Starbucks” had become shorthand for corporate blandness. H&M came in 2015, just as “fast fashion” stopped being aspirational in the West and started being a slur. Victoria’s Secret shipped up when American teens had moved on to Skims and Aerie. Uniqlo, Pottery Barn, and Zara’s aggressive Indian expansion — all arrived in the second half of their Western growth story, never the first. The pattern is almost comical once you see it. Brands land here right when their home market stops being easy money.

Birkenstock is textbook. Their stock is down around 20% this year. Their FY26 guidance disappointed Wall Street last month. The Crocs CEO said recently that customers are “migrating back towards athletic.” The New York Times ran a piece calling the potato-shoe era over. The Western ugly-shoe cycle — the one that put Birkenstock on every Brooklyn influencer’s feet for the last five years — is visibly closing.

Meanwhile, Birkenstock India grew 31% last year. APAC is now the company’s fastest-growing segment globally. In their last earnings call, management told investors this growth will “reduce exposure to the US dollar.”

Translation: we need India to save the story.

And we’re showing up right on cue.

Influencers are doing Birkenstock-with-socks posts in 2026, two years after TikTok in New York was already over them. The aunty who called them chappals at a family function in 2019 bought a pair in taupe last month. There’s an Arizona in every third Uber in Bandra. Wedding sangeets now feature cousins sliding into Bostons for the after-party.

They’re good shoes. I’ll say it twice because the comfort is real. That’s not the argument.

The argument is that the story we tell ourselves about “the brand arriving” is backwards. What actually happened is the brand ran out of easy growth somewhere else, and we became the escape valve. We get to feel arrived. They get to extend the runway.

The Indian premium consumer has become a useful last chapter in a lot of these stories. We show up exactly when the West gets bored, which means we’re buying peak narrative the moment it’s losing its edge.

We always run this cycle two beats behind. We were getting into skinny jeans as they were dying. Oat milk landed in Mumbai cafés the same year America started complaining it was everywhere. Athleisure became a serious Indian category after athleisure had been absorbed so completely in the US that nobody called it athleisure anymore. The pattern is consistent enough that you could almost trade on it — if you could stomach buying the thing your rich cousins in Manhattan are quietly moving on from.

The consolation is that we don’t really care about being first. Indians buy brands for what they signal, not what they predict. A Birkenstock in 2026 Bombay says “I’ve made it.” A Birkenstock in 2026 Brooklyn says “I’m still here, for now.” Those are different jobs, and ours is frankly the more fun one.

Being fashion’s last reliable customer is also its own kind of power. The brands know it. That’s why Birkenstock is opening forty new stores globally next year with India as a focus, even as they guide Wall Street to expect slower growth overall. We’re the hedge. The hedge works.

Maybe that’s fine.

Or maybe it just means we’ll spend the next decade wearing what America is quietly taking off.

[Yash Bhardwaj @ybhrdwj]

Tailwind lays of 75% of their team. the reason is so ironic:

> their css framework became extremely popular w AI coding agents, 75m downloads/mo
> that meant nobody would visit their docs where they promoted paid offerings
> resulting in 40% drop in traffic & 80% revenue loss

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@jamannnnnn Latest IDEs including VSCode solve this problem automatically

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@warikoo The amount of transparency! 🙌

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@intermurphi Insightful!

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@sergeykarayev @jasonfried Better layout!

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@gabrielvaldivia Such simple but useful idea!

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@DoBaniye @amit_i_am @imYadav31 Faced any issues with this so far or found any better option?

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@khushbooverma_ 💯. Any amount of air conditioning can never feel like BLR weather!

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@IndianTechGuide

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@saha_varsha @ankeetmaini Hey, which AI is this? I've seen too many people using this

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@KartikaySadani Too rich to care, I guess!
They just want to get in, doesn't matter which one does

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@khushbooverma_ This is going to be useful!
@RemindMe_OfThis in 2 days

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@Jagaaa_s @BangaloreRoomi @Jagaaa_s what are the overhead costs - cook/maid/furniture rent (if any) etc.

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@mikestrives SaaS. I hope this has good stuff🤞

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@avijeet_writes @Paramssharma @zomato

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

@TechWiser Best automatic washing machine? 🙈

[Akshat Jain @axt_jn]

Scenes from where I stay in Bangalore ✨
There are violin🎻, if you missed! : 🤯
@peakbengaluru