Walk into most sneaker stores in Delhi and the pitch is the same: wall of boxes, glass counter, a staff member asking your size before you've finished looking around. Walk into Superkicks' new GK-II flagship and the first thing you notice is a vinyl station and a sound bar sitting where a cash counter would normally go. That's not an accident. "Most retail spaces are designed to move products," says Kashish Paryani, Superkicks' Chief Operating Officer. "We designed this one to make you stay."
The store opened June 12 in Greater Kailash II's M Block Market, a 1,300 square-foot space designed by Studio ODD that swaps the usual black-white-grey sneaker-shop palette for something that reads more like a well-furnished home than a retail outlet. It's a small store by square footage. It's not a small statement.
A Store Built to Look Like Somebody's House
The facade is the first tell — a Mangalore-style terracotta roof line that has nothing to do with sneaker retail and everything to do with feeling like a neighbourhood you'd actually want to hang around in. Inside, sneakers and apparel sit on freestanding bookshelves, wardrobes, and sideboards instead of the usual wall-mounted shoe racks. Tiled columns break up the floor plan, bay-window seating gives you somewhere to actually sit rather than hover, and the whole thing is lit warm rather than showroom-bright. Co-founder Nisha Lulla singled out one detail in particular: "My favourite feature is the window seating corner. It perfectly captures what we wanted this store to be."
The terracotta accents are a deliberate callback to Superkicks' earlier Delhi location, not a random material choice — the kind of detail that only lands if you've followed the brand across more than one store opening. Superkicks opened its first store in Khar, Mumbai, back in April 2018, founded by Sangeet Paryani and Nisha Lulla; for a company that's been building its identity store by store since then, that continuity matters more than it might look like from the outside.
None of this is cheap to build, either. A 1,300 square-foot fit-out with custom tiled columns, bespoke wooden joinery, and a proper sound system is a meaningfully bigger capital outlay than a standard shop-in-shop retail unit. Superkicks isn't hiding that cost behind the aesthetic — if anything, the design leans into looking considered and expensive, because that's part of the pitch. A store that looks like someone's well-furnished living room signals that the sneakers inside are worth spending time with, not just money on.
Why Physical Retail, and Why Now
This isn't happening in isolation. Foot Locker opened its first South India store at Koramangala Mall in Bengaluru around the same window, RedTape has pushed six new outlets across Jharkhand, Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, and Uttar Pradesh through 2026, and Nexus Select Malls has been leaning into experiential sneaker retail as a draw for footfall. Every one of these moves is betting that after years of D2C and Instagram-drop culture eating into physical retail, sneakerheads still want a room to walk into. India's sneaker industry has grown from a genuine niche into a $2.8 billion market with a real path to $4 billion by 2030, and that kind of growth curve is exactly what pulls capital back into physical stores, not away from them.
What's different about Superkicks' bet specifically is that it isn't chasing the mall-anchor, high-footfall model Foot Locker is running. GK-II's M Block Market is a neighbourhood high street, not a shopping centre — the kind of location that only makes sense if you're building a community hangout first and a transaction point second.
Is the "Cafe, Not a Shop" Approach Actually the Right Call?
I think it is, and I think it's the more interesting bet of the two strategies playing out in Indian sneaker retail right now. Foot Locker's approach — go where the footfall already is — is safe and it works, but it's the same playbook every mall-anchor brand in the country runs. Superkicks betting on a slower, sit-down, browse-and-linger experience in a neighbourhood market is a genuine point of difference, and it's the kind of retail that actually builds the community loyalty a Foot Locker location can't replicate no matter how good its sneaker wall is.
The risk, and it's a real one, is that "experiential retail" has become such an overused pitch in Indian retail generally — from bookstores to coffee chains — that there's a real chance this reads as trend-chasing rather than genuine differentiation five years from now. Superkicks earns some benefit of the doubt here because the brand has been doing physical retail as identity-building, not just square-footage expansion, for years. A newer brand trying this same move would get more skepticism from me.
It also matters which city this landed in first. Delhi's sneaker crowd has always leaned more toward street style and visible flexing than Bangalore's tech-money minimalism or Mumbai's Bollywood-adjacent polish, and a store built around lingering, talking, and being seen fits that culture specifically. Drop this exact concept into a Bangalore mall and it might read as pretentious. In GK-II, it reads as home turf.
Our Take, and What This Means If You're in Delhi
If you're in GK-II, it's worth the visit even if you're not buying anything that day — the store is designed for exactly that kind of browsing, unhurried visit. Superkicks carries Nike, Jordan, adidas (including Samba), Puma, Reebok, and Converse, so it's a genuine one-stop for the mainstream brands most Indian sneakerheads are actually chasing, not just an art installation with shoes in it.
If you're not in Delhi, or you'd rather shop from home, SNKRS CART carries the same lifestyle staples this kind of store is built around — check our Jordan restocks for what's currently available. And for a wider list of where else to buy authentic in India, we put together a full guide to the best sneaker stores in India that's worth bookmarking alongside this one.
More on the store opening, including the design team's full walkthrough, is up via Business News This Week and Lokmat Times.
