Our Brand Story

ERMN — The Story

Here's a strange thing about loving football: you spend your whole life devoted to people who will never know you exist. You memorise their goals. You grieve their losses like they're your own. You argue about them with total strangers. And the closest you ever get to them is a screen.

ERMN started because one kid in Kerala got tired of that distance.

Chapter

The shirt that didn't exist

In Kerala, football isn't a pastime — it's closer to a faith, passed down like a surname. Sarath grew up inside it, worshipping Messi, Ronaldo, Neymar. All he wanted was one simple thing: a shirt that carried the players he loved. Not a knockoff, not a club kit — something that felt like his football. He searched everywhere. It wasn't there. That tiny empty space is the seed the whole brand grew from. Hold onto it, because everything that follows is really just a grown man finally answering a 12-year-old's question.

Chapter

The wrong life

Life had other plans. School ended, family expectations took over, and Sarath landed in a BDS seat he never wanted. Picture it — a kid whose entire soul lives in stadiums, now spending his days staring into strangers' mouths. He hated it with the kind of passion usually reserved for a last-minute own goal.

A soul built for stadiums, stuck in a classroom

Chapter

The bet

So he did the most reckless, most beautiful thing a miserable twenty-something can do — he bet on himself. On 13 February 2022, his brother Thejas's birthday, he started a YouTube channel. Just him, a camera, and an unreasonable number of football opinions. Under 100 days later: 100,000 subscribers. Today: 300,000, and one of the loudest football voices in Kerala. The thing everyone called a distraction turned out to be the only thing he was ever built for.

Chapter

Qatar

That year, he flew to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar with Rhitwik — a friend just as fed up with his own dental college (at this point, dentistry was basically a recruitment pipeline for future founders). Standing inside the tournament they'd only ever watched through a screen, it clicked. The gap from Sarath's childhood was still there — millions of fans, and still no shirt that truly belonged to them. He pitched it on the spot: a football clothing brand, the exact shirts he'd hunted for as a kid.

Rhitwik didn't overthink it. He walked away from dental college — and took the entire fees his family had already paid for it, every last rupee, and put that into ERMN as its very first investment. No backup plan. No second account. He bet his own education on Sarath's idea. That's the kind of 'yes' that rewrites a life.

Sarath brought the vision and the football. Rhitwik became the engine. And Sachin — Sarath's day-one, practically a brother — became the artist whose hands shape everything ERMN makes.

Qatar, 2022

Inside the tournament

The pitch, on the spot

Chapter

The ghost

Now, the name — and this is the good part. Rewind to 2016, a medical-entrance coaching hostel in Kodungallur, where Sarath and Rhitwik were grinding for exams. That hostel had a legend. Every few nights, an anonymous someone broke into rooms and… redecorated. Aggressively. Books taped across the walls. Chairs dangling from the ceiling fan like art installations. Pens drowned in glasses of water. Everything exactly where it should not be. And every single time, one little note left behind, signed with one word: Erumanushyan.

Nobody ever found out who it was. One person? A secret society? The hostel spiralled into accusations, fights, full paranoia — and it only grew, because soon everyone was doing it and blaming the same name. Erumanushyan stopped being a person and became a myth: a spirit of harmless rebellion that refused to leave anything in its assigned place. Years later, when the brand needed a name, they took that exact word — chaos, mystery, refusing to sit where you're told — and cut it down to four letters. ERMN.

Kodungallur, 2016 — where the name was born

Chapter

The long quiet

Then came the part nobody romanticises. For a long time, ERMN ran on pure belief — no safety net, no guarantee, no viral moment waiting to rescue them. And the stakes weren't theoretical: Rhitwik's education money was already on the table, gone, riding entirely on whether this worked. There were months it barely moved, where patience was the only inventory they owned. They didn't fold. They held the line — broke, stubborn, stupidly hopeful — because quitting meant admitting football was just a hobby. And it was never just a hobby. That refusal is the real brand. Not the launch. The not-quitting.

Belief was the only inventory they owned

Chapter

The believers

Eventually the belief got contagious. Sanjay and Athul — Athul a dental dropout himself, naturally — came in as investors, backing ERMN when walking away would've been the safer move. They didn't bet on a t-shirt company. They bet on people who refused to give up.

So, what is ERMN?

It's the answer to that distance you've always felt. The legends you've screamed for at 2 a.m., the moments you've carried in your chest like family — ERMN takes them off the screen and puts them on your back, where you can finally wear them. Made in Kerala. Built by fans who said no to the easy life. For everyone who feels football in their bones the same way.

Because somewhere out there, right now, a kid is still searching for a shirt that doesn't exist yet. This time, we're making it.