At 5'11", Devananda Sudheesh knew the problem before she had a business plan: clothes made for the average fit often did not fit her. As a Mesa undergraduate, she started Willow, a clothing brand for tall women in India. Her student account describes taking the brand past ₹4 lakh in revenue without paid advertising. Devananda also says Willow’s early progress included a quote in ELLE India’s September issue.
The number is a reported sales milestone, not a profit figure. The more revealing part of the story is how she tested the idea with little money, found people who shared the problem and then worked to make the business viable.
Starting with a fit problem
When a Mesa brief asked students to build from an experience they understood, Devananda chose clothing for women like herself. She began without a budget for inventory or ads. Her first orders went through a Bengaluru tailor at no profit, and she put money from sales back into the next pieces.
That early approach let her start before she had a polished supply chain. Willow’s public company page describes a brand for women 5'7" and above, with fit choices such as inseam length. The product had to solve a real, repeatable issue rather than rely on the founder’s own measurements alone.
Finding the people who needed it
Devananda still needed customers. She asked where she could find tall women and tried an unexpected channel: a Hinge profile with a height filter. In the script she shared, she describes reaching potential buyers there for six days before the app banned the profile. The tactic was short-lived, but the conversations and orders showed her that the fit problem existed beyond her own wardrobe.
Her public account also describes more than 30 orders from that experiment. The useful lesson was the customer signal, not the dating-app tactic as a lasting sales channel. She had identified a group, shown them a product and received a response strong enough to keep building elsewhere.
Turning a first sale into a business
As orders grew, Devananda changed manufacturers and worked on margins. The first pieces had helped her test demand at zero profit; a continuing brand needed production that could leave room to operate. She reported more than ₹4 lakh in revenue with zero ad spend in the student material, while continuing to prepare further collections.
Revenue alone does not tell us Willow’s profit or how much the founder has taken home. It does show the distance between a fit problem, a first customer and a repeatable sales process. Devananda had to make decisions about whom to reach, what fit to offer, how to produce it and when to change suppliers.
What Willow shows about learning at Mesa
Our UG students do customer discovery by speaking to people and putting an offer in front of them. Devananda’s choices were her own. Mesa’s build-from-experience prompt gave her a starting point; she found early demand, reinvested and then confronted the operational questions that follow a sale.
Willow is still a founder’s work in progress. Its early path shows what can happen when a student treats a personal frustration as a question to test in the market, then changes the product and process as the evidence comes in.
