🍧🍧Chhaas, Curd and Ice Cream
Insta Help, Celeb Brand Woes, Amazon Fees
Is it just us, or is your feed also full of Ghibli-core cafés, cozy aesthetics, and brands romanticising slowness? Had to try one with classmates visiting town this week.
Too bad that the D2C world doesn’t have that slow luxury. While Instagram sips tea under Sakura trees, the real world is on fire with Amazon slashing fees, ONDC flexing 200M orders, and q-comm poaching captains like it’s an IPL draft.
Let’s cut through the soft filters and bring you what actually moved in India’s D2C ecosystem this week:
🗞️ Marketplace Buzz
ONDC crosses 200M orders, but retail’s still in beta. ONDC says it's hit 200M orders, half of that in just the last six months. That sounds like traction until you zoom in: it’s still primarily ride-hailing and mobility. Grocery and retail? Clunky UX, sky-high returns, and a search that probably makes you miss <insert your bad UX app>.
Heatwave loading. FMCG rushes to Q-Comm aisle. With temperature about to spike, Amul, Mother Dairy, and more are blitzing Zepto and Blinkit. Summer playbook = chhaas, curd, and ice cream in 10 minutes or less. If you’re not on q-comm this summer, you’re melting.
Amazon drops referral fees on 12M SKUs. Blinkit, you watching? Amazon India has axed referral fees and cut shipping rates on 12M+ low-value (< INR 300) products. This isn’t charity, it’s a surgical strike on high-frequency, low-AOV purchases. Watch your cart!
Apna Mart bags $25M to go deep on desi grocery. Their play? Tier 2-first q-comm with serious operational muscle. Founded by Abhishek Singh and Chetan Garg, Apna Mart guarantees grocery and FMCG deliveries within 15 minutes, in addition to its brick-and-mortar stores
Urban Company recently dropped Insta Help, a same-day service solution that sounds like it's trying to ride the quick commerce wave with a twist. The whole 10-minute-fix economy is bubbling. Here’s something for you to keep a tab on who’s playing the qcomm game.
KiranaPro's CEO handed over 1% of his personal equity to every employee. Skin in the game? More like full-body. Loyalty meets legacy, minus the ESOP clause and Happy Budday to you.
🍕 D2C Snippets
Antithesis raises ₹5 cr to build “the luxury of less.” Antithesis is coming for your complicated beauty routine with a pre-seed raise. Aparna Saxena, ex-Good Capital is clearly done watching women roll money on multiple serums and complex routines that all promise glow and deliver meh.
FirstCry is officially done being boxed into the baby aisle. It’s pumping ₹146 cr into its roll-up arm Globalbees Brands. Oh, and there’s another ₹21 cr headed to its UAE play. Baby steps? Please. FirstCry’s scaling like it means it.
Meesho starts wooing Dalal Street? Sanjeev Barnwal’s post confirms that investor relations is now a full-time gig at Meesho. Looks like Meesho’s warming up to quarterly earnings and not just GMV graphs.
Why celeb brands keep flopping except this one K-led beauty. This Mint feature shows the face ≠ brand trap. From 82E to Wrogn, too many stars, not enough soul. Turns out even virality needs a working backend. (paywall link)
Mila Beauté isn’t just scaling, it’s going full stack. ₹5 cr of the new ₹18 cr raise is going into building their own manufacturing capabilities. In the beauty biz, owning the supply chain = owning the margin.
Koparo turned its Shark Tank buzz into serious bank. $1.7M in the bag, and they’re now going all-in on eco-cleaners, D2C-first and brand-led. Clean homes, clean pitch, clean cap table.
📚 Reads & Recos
Q-comm is kirana 2.0 and rebooted. This Arc piece dives deep with Vinay Singh & Prayag Mohanty of Fireside Ventures into an arc of topics from q-commerce to “silvers” to channel-market fit from the lens of q-comm.
Rishabh Mariwala just torched India’s scale-at-all-costs obsession. In this LinkedIn post, he serves up a brutal reminder: Get your channel-market fit in focus first before panning out for the panorama view.
Does early engagement boost reach on Instagram? Check out the results of the experiment.
Brands will need to protect their reputations from AI chatbots.
🔥That’s all for this week! As always, share this with your fellow D2C hustlers, and let’s keep the community growing.
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Amazing info and great insights as always