It was a Tuesday night in November 2023. I was in my flat in Pune, watching a Shaktimaan rerun with two flatmates and eating Maggi — because of course we were — when one of them looked down at my white ankle socks and said, "These are aggressively boring, yaar."

I agreed. They were. And somehow, that sentence lodged itself in my brain and refused to leave.

THE BET

Two days later, I had a rough design on Figma. The Doordarshan logo, red and black stripes, a cream ankle. I showed it to my flatmates and they lost their minds. Not in a "this is great" way — more like a "this is going to break Twitter" way.

My flatmate Richa said: "If you can sell 100 pairs of these in a week, I'll buy you dinner." I raised the stakes. "If I sell 100 pairs in a week, I'm quitting my job." She laughed. I was completely serious.

"I posted it on Twitter at 11pm on a Friday. By Saturday morning, I had 847 orders. By Sunday, I had 1,200."

I found a mill in Ludhiana that would do a 50-pair minimum after three rejections from factories who didn't understand what I was trying to do. Vikram — now our head of supply chain — was the one who finally got it. He called me and said, "This is mad. Let's do it."

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT

The DD socks sold out in 48 hours. I had to turn away orders. I did quit the job. Richa did buy me dinner — and then joined as our first marketing person.

Six months later, Dhaga had done 60,000 pairs. We'd added Maggi, cricket, Shaktimaan, Cartoon Network. We'd hired 11 people. We'd been featured in Bombay Times and a Reddit thread titled "this is the most Indian company I've ever seen."

We wear that as a badge. Find us at dhagastudio.in. Being deeply, unapologetically Indian is not a constraint. It's the whole point.

If you're reading this wearing a pair of our socks — thank you. You're the reason this exists. You're also the reason Richa had to buy that dinner.

Nobody ever made Maggi in 2 minutes. That was a lie. A beautiful, necessary, universally accepted lie that every Indian household agreed to maintain for decades.

You boiled the water. You added the noodles. You stirred in the tastemaker. And then you waited. Seven minutes at minimum. Usually nine. Sometimes twelve, because you got distracted by the TV.

"Maggi wasn't a meal. It was an event. A ritual. The smell alone was enough to make your whole body relax."

WHY WE MADE THE SOCK

When Priya (me) was designing the second collection, I kept asking myself: what do people feel before they feel nostalgia? The answer, almost always, was hunger. Specifically, the Maggi kind.

The Maggi Break sock is orange-striped with a cream foot — the colour of the packet, the colour of the broth. It's soft. Softer than our other socks, by design. Because Maggi always felt like relief. Like someone had slowed the world down to a manageable pace.

We put the word "2 MINUTE" on the ankle, because we're not above leaning into the joke. You know it's not 2 minutes. We know it's not 2 minutes. But maybe that's what nostalgia is — the belief in a more convenient version of things that never actually existed.

The Maggi Break sock is our bestselling design, six months running. Which tells us everything we need to know about how much everyone misses that smell.

The first time I walked into the mill in Ludhiana and showed the owner our Pokéball design, he looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at me. Then back at the design.

"This is a ball," he said.

"Yes," I said. "A very specific ball. From a Japanese cartoon. That millions of Indian children grew up watching."

He stared at me for another full five seconds. "Okay," he said. "Show me the other designs."

THE CHALLENGE

Making nostalgia-accurate sock patterns requires more precision than people expect. The Pokéball isn't just red and white — it's the exact weight of the red, the exact placement of the button, the specific way the equator line divides it. Get any of that wrong and it reads as "generic red ball."

"Nostalgia has very high standards. People know exactly what they remember. You can't approximate a childhood memory."

We spent six weeks on the Tom & Jerry sock alone. The grey has to be that specific Tom grey — not too blue, not too warm. The yellow has to feel like Jerry's warmth. These are not things you can brief a colour-matching system to do. Someone has to feel it.

WHAT WE LEARNED

Eight Cartoon Network designs later, we've learned that the best sock designs are the ones that work as abstraction. You don't put Pikachu's face on a sock. You put the energy of Pikachu — the yellow, the lightning bolt, the brightness — into a pattern, and let people's memory fill in the rest. That's actually more powerful than direct reproduction. It's more them and less us.

The Ludhiana mill owner, by the way, now refers to himself as "the man who makes the cartoon socks." He told his neighbour about us. His neighbour's kid started watching Pokémon reruns. We consider this a win.