FashionAudit publishes brand audits: permanent reference pages on fashion, footwear, watch, bag, makeup and skincare brands, written for someone who is actually shopping in India. This page explains how those pages are put together — which sources we accept, what happens when a fact cannot be verified, how we work out whether Indian pricing is fair, and who is accountable for the verdict at the bottom of each audit.
It is deliberately specific. A site whose whole pitch is fighting fashion misinformation cannot just assert that it checks things. It has to show the working.
What a brand audit is
An audit is a reference page, not a news post. It is meant to still be useful in three years after a light refresh, so we update audits rather than replacing them with a new article every season.
Every audit follows the same skeleton: a snapshot table, how the brand started, what it actually makes and where, what it costs in India, who it is genuinely for, reputation and controversies, how to buy it here, and the verdict. The order never changes. That consistency is what lets you compare two brands in the same category in about a minute, and jump straight to the section you came for.
Audits run 1,200 to 1,800 words. When a brand has less to say about it, the page gets shorter. We do not pad a page to look thorough.
Where our facts come from
Every factual claim in an audit is captured with the source that supports it before it is written. We prefer sources in this order:
- Primary sources — the brand’s own newsroom, investor relations pages, annual reports and regulatory filings, including MCA filings in India, SEC filings in the US and Companies House in the UK.
- Trade press — Business of Fashion, Vogue Business, WWD, Hodinkee for watches, Retail Dive for retail operations.
- Indian business press — Economic Times Retail, Mint and Business Standard, particularly for India entry, pricing, distribution and store counts.
- Mainstream press — for controversies, litigation and regulatory action.
We do not use content farms, SEO listicles, unattributed blogs, AI-generated brand summaries, or forum and Reddit threads. Wikipedia is a lead worth following, never the citation itself — we go to the source it cites and read that.
The reference list stays on the published page, with each link labelled by the claim it supports. Anyone should be able to check us without writing to ask.
What happens when a fact cannot be verified
One of two things. Either the audit says “Not publicly disclosed”, or the claim is cut.
What we never do is split the difference. “The brand is believed to have been founded around 1985” reads like knowledge and contains none. A blank in the snapshot table is more honest than a confident guess, and it also tells you something real: that the brand has chosen not to disclose it.
Where good sources disagree, the audit says so in the body rather than quietly picking one. Fastrack is a live example. Titan’s own heritage page dates the brand’s launch to 2003, while Business Standard’s reporting has it launched as a Titan sub-brand in 1998 and carved out as a separate business unit in 2005. The disagreement is stated on the page, because how a company narrates its own history is often the interesting part.
Five categories of fact go wrong most often, so each is checked independently rather than accepted from the first result:
- Current ownership. Brands change hands quietly, and the most-cited answer is often years out of date. We look for the most recent transaction.
- Founding year. Brands routinely backdate to a predecessor company or a founder’s earlier venture.
- Manufacturing location. “Designed in” is not “made in”. We say only what the source actually supports.
- Revenue and valuation. From filings or the company itself. Estimates attributed to unnamed sources do not go on the page.
- Prices. Always current, always dated in the text.
How we work out what a brand costs in India
This is the section most audits are built around, and it is the one place where the arithmetic needs to be visible.
We take the global price from the brand’s home-market site in local currency, convert it at the rate on the day of writing and state that rate, then compare it with the Indian MRP taken from the brand’s India site or an authorised retailer. Marketplace listings are not used as the Indian price, because grey-market and unauthorised stock sits alongside official stock and the two are priced differently.
A converted global price is not the Indian price. The gap between them is the whole story, and it is made of four things: import duty, GST, distributor and retail margin, and the brand’s own pricing strategy for India.
Duty is the part most people underestimate, because the components stack on top of each other. For wristwatches, as of August 2026, on an assessable value of ₹2 lakh:
| Component | Rate | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Basic customs duty | 20% of assessable value | ₹40,000 |
| AIDC | 20% of the basic duty | ₹8,000 |
| Social welfare surcharge | 20% of duty plus AIDC | ₹4,800 |
| IGST | 18% of the whole landed value | ₹45,504 |
| Total | About 49% | ₹98,304 |
So roughly half the gap on an imported watch is explained before a single rupee of margin is added. Rates differ by product category and change with each Union Budget, so every audit states the rates it used and the month they applied. When the Indian MRP is far above what duty, tax and a normal margin explain, the audit says that plainly. When Indian pricing is genuinely good — usually because the brand manufactures here — it says that too.
Where a brand does not publish a global price we can read, the audit says the comparison could not be made. It does not quote a resale or marketplace figure and call it the global price.
How we assess counterfeit risk
For watches, sneakers and bags this matters more than any other section, so it gets the same treatment as pricing.
Each audit lists the official channels — brand stores, the brand’s own India site, named authorised retailers — and which marketplaces carry legitimate stock. It gives the counterfeit risk level for that brand’s products and the specific tells, since “first copy” (the common Indian term for a counterfeit) quality varies enormously by category.
We do not describe a seller as safe unless the brand or its Indian distributor lists it. An unverified recommendation is exactly the kind of thing that costs a reader real money.
The verdict is a judgement, not a summary
Every audit closes with the FA take: a view you could reasonably disagree with, with the reasoning shown. “A well-made bag for those who appreciate quality” is not a verdict. “The leather is genuinely good, but you are paying about 40% over the US price for the same bag — worth it only if you cannot wait for a trip abroad” is one.
We do not give brands a numeric score. A number implies a precision we do not have, and it invites brands to argue about the decimal instead of the reasoning.
No brand gets a pass for being popular, large or heavily advertised. If the honest answer is that something is not worth its Indian price, that is what the page says.
How these pages are written
Our audits are drafted with the help of AI and then checked and edited by a person before anything goes live.
In practice: the brand is researched against the sources above, each claim is captured with the URL that supports it, a draft is written to the fixed template, and the draft is then read line by line against those sources by Ankush Kumar, who edits it, cuts anything that cannot be stood behind, and signs it off. Nothing publishes automatically and nothing publishes unread.
We state this plainly because the alternative — implying that a person typed every word — is exactly the small dishonesty this site exists to argue against. What decides whether a page is worth your time is whether the facts are right, whether the reporting is specific to India, and whether the verdict is honest. That test does not change with the tool.
Money and independence
- We do not accept payment for coverage, for a verdict, or for a place on any list.
- Brands cannot buy inclusion, removal or a rewrite, and we do not send drafts to brands for approval before publishing.
- Where a page carries affiliate links, the disclosure appears above the first link, not buried at the bottom. Affiliate links never appear in the controversies section or next to the verdict.
- A commission never changes a judgement. If we recommend against buying something, that stays on the page whether or not there is a link on it.
A correction from a brand is always welcome. A request to soften a sourced fact is not.
Updates and corrections
Every audit carries the month and year its prices were checked. Audits keep the same URL through a refresh, so a page you bookmark stays the page you come back to.
We revisit an audit when the brand changes hands, when Indian prices are revised, when duty or GST rates change, or when something documented and significant happens to the brand’s reputation.
If you find a factual error, tell us and point to what you believe the correct source says. We check it against the primary source, fix it if it is wrong, and note the change on the page rather than editing quietly.
Who writes them
Brand audits are written and edited by Ankush Kumar, founder and editor of FashionAudit. Every audit carries that byline, because a site making confident judgements about brands needs an accountable person behind them. Anonymous authority is weak authority.
You can start with the watch brand audits, which is where the India price gap tends to be widest.
References
- The Hour Markers, guide to customs duty on watches imported into India — the duty stack and the roughly 49% total incidence used in the worked example
