Twenty pairs a day. That is the entire supply of the Thums Up x Gully Labs sneaker, and none of them are for sale. Since 3 September, the only way to get the Gully Number 001 in "Toofani Blue" or "Thunder White" has been to finish between third and twenty-second on the daily leaderboard of a swipe game called Thunder Trail, then punch a code into a hidden "Redeem Now" page on gullylabs.com, where the pair is listed at ₹5,000 and charged at zero.
It is the strangest sneaker release in India this year, and the most interesting. Coca-Cola India, which has owned Thums Up since paying $60 million for it in 1993 and crossed a billion dollars in annual sales with it in 2021, chose a two-year-old Noida workshop over any global sportswear partner to put its cola on a shoe. Then it made the shoe unbuyable. Both decisions tell you where Indian sneaker culture is heading faster than any Jordan drop does.
The Shoe: A Number 001 With a Bottle Cap on It
Gully Labs built both colourways on its Number 001 low-top, the same last that carries the Baaz Bitter Black at ₹4,490 and the Rekhe Brown at ₹5,990 on the main site. The Toofani Blue, per Gully Labs' own product listing, uses a premium synthetic leather upper with a red synthetic leather "Baaz trail" along the side, blue eyelets, Baaz embroidery on the back tab, a natural rubber sole and bamboo lycra lining. The Thunder White swaps the red trail for distorted artwork across the same panel and goes red on the eyelets. Both carry the Gully Labs heel-counter branding.
The detail that makes it a Thums Up shoe is a detachable metal cap on a metal chain, which Gully Labs describes as a recall to the original Thums Up bottle cap. That is the entire collab in one object: no giant logo across the quarter panel, no cola-brown colourway, just a crown cap you can clip on or take off. Our take: it is the only genuinely good idea on the shoe, and it is good enough. Toofani Blue is the pair to want. The red trail against blue eyelets is the Thums Up logo without the logo, while Thunder White reads like any other white 001 until you get close.
Men's sizes run UK 6 to 12, women's UK 3 to 8. Esquire India's September round-up, which was the first mainstream coverage, calls Gully Labs "a New Delhi brand that makes its sneakers by hand" and notes the drop is "easy to miss if you only follow the big names." That was generous. It was easy to miss if you followed Gully Labs too; the products went live on Shopify on 2 September with no public announcement beyond a redemption page.
How the Game Works, and the Real Odds
Thunder Trail lives on Coca-Cola's Thunder Zone site. You register with an Indian mobile number and an OTP, get five plays a day, start each run with three lives, and swipe boxes in the direction of their arrows as they come down a single lane. A Thunder Box is 15 points, a Firefox or Gully Labs bonus box is 50, a heart box restores a life. Your best score of the day goes on the leaderboard. Ranks 1 and 2 win a Thums Up x Firefox BMX; ranks 3 to 22 win the shoes, one pair each. A participant can win once in the whole promotion. Those mechanics were documented by CoolzTricks on 5 September and match the DesiDime deal thread.
Run the numbers. The promotion runs 3 September to 3 November, which is 62 days. Twenty pairs a day is at most 1,240 pairs in the entire country, split across two colourways and two size runs. For scale, Gully Labs tells Images BoF it makes 6,000 to 7,000 pairs a month. This is a fortnight of factory output, released at the rate of one Delhi Metro coach's worth of people per day. Nike's own CEO spent last week telling investors that Jordan oversupplied its retros. Coca-Cola, of all companies, just ran a tighter release than Jordan Brand.
Why Gully Labs Is Suddenly Every Indian Brand's Sneaker Partner
This is not a one-off. The same week Thums Up's game went live, Images Business of Fashion profiled the company and listed confirmed partnerships with Thums Up, CMF by Nothing and Tata Sierra, plus a global footwear brand, a designer and a candy company still to be announced. On 5 October, Local Samosa reported a 500-pair Royal Challenge Packaged Drinking Water sneaker on the Baaz silhouette with Varun Sood as the face. Two beverage brands, one month, one Noida workshop.
The reason is in the profile. Arjun Singh and Animesh Mishra, the latter ex-Bain, started the brand in August 2023 and opened a 1,000 square foot hand-lasting workshop in Noida Sector 10 in April 2024 with six karigars. By September 2026 the company reports ₹3.5 crore in monthly revenue, ₹35 to 40 crore raised, 60 SKUs, a flagship store in Delhi and five Broadway counters. For an FMCG marketing team, that is the perfect partner: Indian enough to tell a story, small enough to say yes to a 1,240-pair custom run, and already priced at the ₹4,000 to ₹6,000 band that we argued in June was the open lane in Indian sneakers after Deepinder Goyal's ₹8.7 crore seed cheque.
Here is our worry, stated plainly. A brand whose whole pitch is "raw, real and untold stories" from Indian neighbourhoods is now a reliable supplier of promo footwear for colas and bottled water. Thums Up's "Aaj Kuch Toofani Karte Hain" anthem with Hanumankind and Vishal Dadlani, launched in February with a logo refresh in spiced red and storm blue, is excellent brand work. But the shoe underneath it is a stock 001 with a charm. If the next three collabs are the same shoe with a different clip-on, Gully Labs becomes the Indian equivalent of a blank-tee printer. The Thums Up pair is good because it is the first. The fifth will not be.
Should You Chase It?
Yes, and not because of the shoe. Five swipes a night costs nothing, the pairs are real hand-lasted 001s with a ₹5,000 list value, and there is no catch beyond a mobile number. The Firefox BMX is the better prize if you can crack the top two, but the shoes are the realistic target, and 20 slots a day on a reflex game is more winnable than any SNKRS raffle you have entered this year.
Resale: there is none to quote and we will not invent one. No pair has traded on StockX, GOAT or any Indian marketplace because no pair has been sold. If a secondary market forms, it will form around redemption codes rather than shoes, and a code is worth exactly what a stranger on Telegram tells you it is. Treat anyone offering one as a scam until the pair is at your door. Deliveries, per the collection page, complete by November.
Styling: Toofani Blue wants raw denim and a white tee, cap charm on, nothing else blue. Thunder White goes with everything, which is the problem with it.
A cola that beat Coca-Cola in its own country has put its cap on a shoe made by hand in Noida and handed it out twenty pairs at a time. That is a more Indian sneaker story than anything with a Swoosh will manage this year. If you would rather buy than swipe, see what we have in stock, every pair authenticated and shipped pan-India.
For the wider picture on where Gully Labs sits against Comet, Thaely and the rest of the homegrown wave, read our guide to India's homegrown sneaker brands.
