How Indian D2C Brands Are Rewriting Their Playbook For Profitable Growth

At Inc42's D2C & Retail Summit in Gurugram, executives from three Indian direct-to-consumer brands described how they are moving away from growth-at-any-cost strategies and toward models built around contribution margins, channel mix discipline, and customer acquisition efficiency, per Inc42.

The Bear House, a menswear brand, has been the most explicit about treating each sales channel as a distinct function rather than an interchangeable revenue source. Cofounder Harsh Somaiya said the brand used online marketplaces primarily for customer acquisition, its own D2C platform to gather consumer data and insights, and physical retail stores to build brand experience. "We started looking at the channel mix and we started understanding what is the right play for us. We've been a marketplace-first brand, we've grown our D2C, now it is retail," Somaiya told the summit, according to Inc42.

Ethnicwear brand Neeru's has reached a different conclusion about physical retail formats. MD Avnish Kumar said the company experimented with smaller 1,000–1,500 sq ft outlets but has since returned to larger 5,000–6,000 sq ft experiential stores. Wedding and festive shoppers, he argued, seek a wider product assortment and a richer in-store experience that the smaller formats could not deliver. Kumar also warned against using deep discounting to drive growth, saying brands should protect gross margins rather than chase topline numbers — recommending instead that purpose-built "factory outlet" products be created specifically for sale events.

On customer acquisition, Neeru's has leaned into regional marketing rather than broad national campaigns. Kumar described a recent push in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana featuring actor Sreeleela alongside a regional song released during Dussehra. He claimed the results were significant: "The kind of numbers we did and the kind of new customers that we added to our portfolio in one go in 30 days, we couldn't have done that in three years," per Inc42.

Ayurvedic brand Elements Wellness took a different path to scale entirely. Founder Rajesh Chandan said the company built a top line of more than ₹1,300 Cr without relying heavily on traditional digital influencer marketing, a notable departure from the acquisition playbook most D2C brands in India have followed over the past several years, according to Inc42. The source does not detail what acquisition channels the brand used instead.

The broader signal across all three brands, as Inc42 reports, is a structural shift in how Indian D2C companies measure success — with channel economics, gross margin protection, and acquisition cost efficiency displacing raw revenue growth as the primary metrics guiding strategy.