1996Pineapple on a pizza. KFC and Pizza Hut land, and Vaidya's father asks who puts pineapple and cheese on a pizza. The same country now eats a chicken makhani one. Other things refuse to move: a packet of chips is still ten rupees.
2013He values Myntra. The youngest member of a private equity team gets handed the e-commerce beat, puts a number on Myntra at the end of the year, then spends time on Jabong, Pepperfry and BlueStone. What he saw was access for tier-two and tier-three consumers who had the aspiration and the money but no branded store near them, and through to 2016 the question kept moving: t-shirts, then shirts, then trousers, then shoes, then socks, then sunglasses.
2014-15Mark my words, this is a fad. A very large offline retailer tells anyone who will listen that the e-commerce thing is going away.
2016-18Nobody would say D2C out loud. The term was mythical, imported from the West, and he called himself e-commerce first or online only. He built Dr. Vaidya's on performance marketing alone, brand came late, and it worked because a customer searching for ayurveda online had nowhere else to land. He and Vishal first met in a Bangalore hotel lobby in 2018.
2021A cold LinkedIn message turns into a fund. A Belgium-based, single-LP consumer investor, twenty-five years in the category and eleven of them in India, wanted an ex-founder under forty who had built and sold a consumer business. Three or four months of calls led to an October offsite in Spain with the fifty or sixty people on the global team, and a December board presentation that allocated the capital. He had written about a hundred angel cheques in the two and a half years after selling his own business.
2023Six per cent of retail, thirty thousand brands. E-commerce has crept from about 4% to 6 or 7% and general trade still carries the bulk of Indian consumption, while the forecast of 6,000 D2C brands by 2024 is long past: he puts the real count above 30,000, with 1,250 through the weekend cohort he and his wife teach. A founder now gets roughly three months to learn what took him a year.
Next decadeAspiration gets more specific. He never knew where Sachin holidayed; a teenager now sees the airport outfit and the dressing room, wants the one lakh rupee sneaker and buys the three thousand rupee one with the same silhouette first. The cheaper brand is the on-ramp rather than the knockoff, and the real purchase arrives a decade later.
