🥶Brutal Business & Iced Cafe🥶
Mamaearth's PnL, Valmo's troubles, Shiprocket's DRHP, Cult.Fit's hustle
Mango season’s peaking, and so are founder dreams. Everyone wants to be the Alphonso: premium, polished, priced to flex. But the real ones? They’re building like Langras- no frills, all flavour, scaling quietly while the Alphonsos pose for the 'Gram.
Whether it’s CACs or Kesar, everything’s better when it’s pulpy, messy, and meme-worthy. So, peel back the noise and let’s dive into the madness- insights with no added preservatives.
PS: Mango memes are temporary. Margins are forever.
🗞️ Marketplace Buzz
Quick commerce is the fastest FMCG channel nobody’s profiting from- yet. Sales jumped 50 to 100% in FY25 for the channel across biggies like HUL, Tata Consumer, and Britannia. But its share of total sales? Still just 2% to 4%. Why does this small slice matter? Because it’s the only channel with velocity, visibility, and data so real-time it hurts. The challenge? Margin leaks and assortment confusion are still real.
Sure, quick commerce is just 2% to 4% of total sales for FMCG giants, but for Nestlé, it’s 60% of their online biz. That’s not a channel test, that’s a channel bet. While peers worry about margins, Nestlé’s moved half its D2C online muscle to Blinkit, Zepto & co., proving that speed kills in a good way, if your SKUs are snackable and your ops are tight. Nestlé’s playing dark-store distribution with shelf-ready packs and q-comm-only formats.
Meesho’s Valmo play was bold, but now it’s boxed in. What started as a power move to ditch 3PL giants now looks like a strategic U-turn. Valmo was Meesho’s shot at logistics independence (and for a while, it worked), triggering consolidation and sending shockwaves through the ops stack. But with Delhivery & Co. tightening their grip and Valmo hitting scale walls, Meesho’s asset-light bet is now its constraint.
Shiprocket’s DRHP just dropped, but quietly. Backed by Zomato and Temasek, the logistics OS for India’s D2C army has filed its ₹2,500 Cr IPO papers via SEBI’s stealth route. No loud flex, just a silent bet that infra is the new moat. From checkout APIs to warehouse plumbing, Shiprocket’s building the stack behind every cart.
Zepto just iced Café ops in 44 smaller cities after a supply chain mess and a ₹250Cr/month burn that made the model unsustainable. Teams got trimmed, burn cut to ₹95Cr, and a Q3 reset is in the air. But let’s be real: if tier-2 can’t deliver margin, this playbook needs rewriting. Turns out, quick food isn’t a quick win!
Ecom built the D2C dream, and now it’s taxing it like a landlord on steroids. Platform fees hitting 50%, ad spends nuking another 40%, and quick commerce? It’s the worst of both worlds: zero transparency and high burn. Founders are moving crores and still leaking lakhs. Right now, it’s not ecommerce vs D2C- it’s pick your poison.
Glance AI just turned your face into a checkout funnel. Snap a selfie, and boom!- AI drapes you in drip, links you to 400+ brands, and dares you not to buy. The InMobi-backed unicorn has dropped what it calls the world’s first “inspiration-led commerce” engine. Built on Google’s Gemini and Imagen, this isn’t search, it’s seduction. No scrolls, no filters, just pure impulse on lock screens. If this scales, every idle glance becomes a GMV spike. Didn’t Google release something similar this week🤔?
🍕 D2C Snippets
Cult.fit’s sweating hard to become Decathlon with better branding. It’s not just about gyms anymore, with 15–20 more stores dropping this year as Cultsport pushes deeper into retail. This Lululemon ambition with desi distribution is riding a ₹257 Cr vertical that’s chasing athleisure, not abs. Q-comm? Still beta, but accessories and lightwear are fair game. If this hybrid model clicks, Cult won’t just train you, it’ll dress you. Details on the full hustle here.
Otipy runs out of juice; farm-fresh couldn’t outgrow the burn. Despite ₹160Cr in FY24 sales, Otipy’s grocery hustle just shut shop with cash dried up, vendor dues piled up, 300 jobs gone and ₹373 Cr raised till date. Founder’s in fire-sale mode to pay bills, but this is the reality check: high-frequency, low-margin only works with ruthless ops and deep pockets.
Miraggio’s going from scrolls to storefronts with a $6.5M war chest. After tripling ARR and hitting ₹110 Cr in FY25 gross sales, the handbag disruptor is now gunning for premium perception, launching laptop bags and clutches. If they get store ops right, Miraggio could do to handbags what Charles & Keith did to heels.
Mamaearth’s topline is glowing, but the P&L’s still in therapy. Honasa clocked ₹534 Cr in Q4 revenue (+13% YoY), but net profit slipped 18% to ₹25 Cr. Why? Project Neev- their offline reboot- is still in healing mode. DermaCo is cruising offline, Ayuga and Aqualogica are growing 30%+, but Mamaearth itself needs a glow-up.
BlackCarrot just turned your dinner plate into a health pitch. The brand raised pre-seed cash from celeb VCs to scale toxin-free cutlery like bone china sans bone, lead-free glass, 304 steel food grade cutlery. Already on Zepto, Nykaa, and the usual suspects, they’re betting your next lifestyle flex is what you eat on.
📢Power Talk
“This is a brutal business. You don’t get a day to fix problems. You get 15 minutes. It’s a just-in-time supply chain with real-world variables: weather, traffic, and local shutdowns, and each dark store needs to perform like clockwork. That’s why operational discipline is so important,” - Kabeer Biswas, Vice-President-Flipkart Minutes
📚 Reads & Recos
Aspiration isn’t garnish, it’s the main course. Whether it’s Comet flexing logos or Jewelbox building family loyalty, every founder agreed: you're not selling stuff, you're selling status, self-worth, and scroll-stopping relevance. Instagram is the new storefront, loyalty is a long game, and quality is just the entry ticket.
Google’s AI results are getting more... monetised. Ads are now baked into AI Overviews and AI Mode, meaning your chatbot search is basically a shopping mall with a soft tone. The search giant is turning the top of the funnel into a paid playground. For D2C brands, it means two things: you’ll need GPT-proof SEO, and your paid game better match your organic story. Welcome to the age of sponsored intelligence.
Check out this brilliant essay by Sangeet. Humans as 'luxury goods' in the age of AI. Human skills will continue to matter. But they will command economic value only when tightly bundled with curiosity, curation, and judgment.
At Google’s I/O conference, the tech giant announced the rollout of a new AI search tool called AI Mode, a new virtual try-it-on feature, and teased the upcoming launch of a checkout feature powered by (you guessed it) agentic AI. Google wants to improve everything from inspiration and consideration all the way to purchase using AI.
That’s all for this week! Bye!
PS: Folks at some companies have told us this newsletter is almost mandatory weekly reading for their teams 🥰. If your company is not in on it yet, get your teams on the latest in the e-commerce space every week