Gumlet proves to be SouledStore’s superpower.

The Souled Store is India's leading pop culture and fandom lifestyle brand. Built by four founders who turned their love for superheroes, anime, and sitcoms into a $58M business, the India-based D2C brand now serves over 8 million customers, holds 200+ licensing partnerships with franchises like Marvel, Disney, One Piece, and Naruto, and processes 40k+ orders daily through its website, app, and 40+ retail stores.

What makes The Souled Store's image challenge unique: when you're selling a graphic tee, the visuals are the entire reason someone buys. With 89% of traffic coming from mobile and a Gen Z-heavy audience that bounces quickly, every product image needs to render prints perfectly and instantly across thousands of SKUs that rotate with every new movie release, anime season, or cultural moment.

What challenges were they facing?

1. Design-heavy product images demanding optimal presentation of graphic prints, but file sizes slowing mobile load times for a 89% mobile audience

2. Organic search rankings under pressure from poor Core Web Vitals - with 33% of traffic coming from Google, every position counts

3. Rising CDN and image delivery costs as the catalog scaled to 6,000+ live styles with multiple images per SKU

4. Growing CDN costs as the catalog scaled across 200+ franchises with constant seasonal and release-driven collection drops

So what worked?

With Gumlet Image, The Souled Store automated image delivery across its entire catalog - preserving the graphic fidelity that drives purchases while cutting load times and costs.

• Automatic WebP/AVIF conversion that compresses file sizes aggressively without softening the fine detail in graphic prints - the exact detail a customer is paying for
• Device-aware resizing serving optimized images to every screen, from flagship iPhones to the budget Androids that dominate The Souled Store's tier-2 and tier-3 audience
• 54% reduction in CDN and image delivery costs through intelligent compression, directly improving unit economics for a brand that just turned profitable
• Core Web Vitals improvement across the site, strengthening organic visibility for high-intent searches like "Marvel t-shirts India" and "anime merchandise online"
• 11% lift in add-to-cart rates as faster product pages kept Gen Z shoppers engaged through the browse-to-buy journey - on the device where 89% of them shop
• 2-week migration with zero downtime