Most companies preparing to list hire a banker. factori.com has hired a veteran CFO who spent close to three decades in the apparel and garment industry, two years before it intends to file for IPO.
BENGALURU, 7 October 2026: Companies preparing for a public listing usually reach for a banker or a career CFO. factori.com has reached for someone who has spent twenty-six years inside the industry it manufactures for.
The Bengaluru-based manufacturing and sourcing platform today announced the appointment of Devaprasad H S, Regional Chairman of the Southern Regional Committee of the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India (CMAI), as a Director on its board. He takes up the role with immediate effect and will lead the company’s preparation of its accounts, controls and compliance function ahead of a public listing the company has targeted for 2028.
Two things about the appointment are unusual. The first is the runway: factori.com is starting its listing preparation roughly two years before it intends to file, treating audit readiness as a multi-year build rather than a pre-IPO scramble. The second is the choice of person. Financial engineering is the conventional answer to a listing; industry credibility is not, and it is harder to buy.
“Nobody made us do this. We brought Mr Devaprasad onto the board because we would rather find out in 2026 what is wrong with our books than in 2028.”
– C S Sudheer, Founder, factori.com
A career inside branded consumer manufacturing
Devaprasad H S sits on CMAI’s national Managing Committee by virtue of his chairmanship of the association’s Southern region. CMAI is India’s oldest and largest apparel industry body, more than 20,000 member companies across manufacturing, exports, retail and ancillary industry, in existence for over five decades. It created the Apparel Export Promotion Council in 1978, has run the National Garment Fair since 1982, is authorised by the Government of India to issue Certificates of Origin, and represents India on the International Apparel Federation and the Asian Apparel Federation.
His executive career was spent in branded sportswear. He spent 26 years at Proline India, the Batra Group company that brought the Italian sportswear brand FILA to the Indian market in 2000, latterly as President and Chief Financial Officer. His time there spanned the arrival of international athletic brands in India, the shift from importing finished goods to manufacturing them domestically, and the licensing consolidation that ultimately moved the FILA India rights to Cravatex Brands and, in October 2022, into Metro Brands’ listed portfolio.
He is also a regular voice on compliance in Indian apparel. In November 2024 he spoke at the Confederation of Indian Textile Industry’s Bengaluru workshop on human rights due diligence and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, arguing that Indian suppliers should engage with the incoming European regimes proactively rather than wait to be audited into them.
“Mr Devaprasad has spent his career inside a branded consumer business that had to answer to an international licensor, Indian regulators and a bank, all at once. That is closer to what a listed company lives with than anything a first-time founder has experienced. He is not joining us to attend four meetings a year.”
– C S Sudheer, Founder, factori.com
The mandate
The role is specific rather than ceremonial. Mr Devaprasad will lead factori.com’s accounts and compliance teams through the work a listing requires and most companies leave too late: restating historical accounts to listing standards, building internal financial controls that will survive an auditor’s review, tightening related-party and revenue-recognition policy, and establishing the audit and risk committee structures a listed company must operate.
For a business with the shape factori.com has, that work is not trivial. The company manufactures across 64 product categories, a count rising by roughly two a week, works with over 600 manufacturing partners, ships to more than 130 countries, and simultaneously operates a consumer-facing retailing platform with over 1,23,000 registered sellers. Consolidating a manufacturing supply chain and a digital marketplace into accounts a public-market investor can read is a genuine piece of engineering.
“What interested me was that this is a manufacturer first. India has plenty of platforms sitting on top of somebody else’s supply. Very few of them own the factory relationships, the stock and the fulfilment.”
– Devaprasad H S, Director, factori.com
The company behind the announcement
factori.com is operated by Sushine Exports Private Limited and supplies bulk apparel, uniforms and corporate goods to organisations including the Indian Navy, ISRO, Samsung, Decathlon and Amazon. It operates a 1.5-acre fulfilment centre in Bengaluru.
In August 2026 it opened that infrastructure to individuals through retailing.factori.com, a service that lets a person launch an independent e-commerce store, their own domain, their own brand, an integrated payment gateway and access to more than 10,000 ready-to-ship products, without buying inventory. The company charges no commission on those sellers’ sales. It describes the model as “truecommerce”: commerce in which the seller, not the platform, holds the brand, the customer and the margin.
The 2028 listing ambition sits on top of both businesses, a B2B manufacturing operation with two decades of institutional customers, and a consumer platform whose registered seller base has passed 1,23,000.
“That is a harder business to build and a cleaner one to take public, provided the discipline is put in early. Two years is enough time to do this properly. Six months is not.”
– Devaprasad H S, Director, factori.com
Whether the consumer platform converts into consistently trading stores at scale remains the open question, and the company has said that sign-ups are not the metric that will matter. The appointment announced today signals that factori.com intends to be able to answer that question in public, with audited numbers, by 2028.
About factori.com
factori.com is a Bengaluru-based manufacturing and sourcing platform operated by Sushine Exports Private Limited. It manufactures across 64 product categories with more than 600 manufacturing partners, ships to over 130 countries, and operates a 1.5-acre fulfilment centre in Bengaluru. Its institutional customers include the Indian Navy, ISRO, Samsung, Decathlon and Amazon. Through retailing.factori.com, launched in August 2026, it allows individuals to run independent e-commerce stores on the same infrastructure with no inventory and no commission on their sales.
Media contact
contact@factori.com
+91 874 707 4444
factori.com Headquarters, Bannerughatta to Jigani Road, Begihalli, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560105
Corporate Identity Number: U47911KA2023PTC177002
