The Champu story began in 2014 when three former college classmates got the bug to start a business about a year after graduating. Co-founder and CEO Siddharth Jain was hard at work in a Wall Street job that he says “didn’t have a lot of heart” and was itching to do something entrepreneurial and meaningful.

Meanwhile, Siddharth's former college roommate Rahul Bansal was tinkering with the earliest iteration of the champu.in the website, which would let people upload graphics onto t-shirts and buy them as special keepsakes.