🛵Rural Sales Army
Realiance's digital muscle, Flipkart's cash burn, Meesho's run rate
Terror tried to shake us this week. In Pahalgam, cruelty made headlines. But courage, the quiet, stubborn kind, carries on in the margins. We’re not here to add noise. We're here because building, daring, dreaming and refusing to stop is how we honour the lives interrupted.
This week's D2C Surge is for those who choose to create, even when the world breaks your heart.
🗞️ Marketplace Buzz
Flipkart’s cash burn just triggered crisis mode. With $40M evaporating every month, Walmart is tightening the screws, and fast. The board wants spends throttled yesterday. Between prepping for Big Billion Days and killing non-performing units, Flipkart’s 2025 might look much less YOLO and more frugal.
America's backseat driving India's e-commerce? Washington's flexing: asking India to open the floodgates for Amazon and Walmart. If this goes through, founders, brace yourselves for deeper discount wars and zero breathing room. Game on.
Dark stores aren’t just warehouses - they’re weapons. Players like Apna Mart, KiranaPro, and Kiko Live aren’t building storage spaces; they’re fortifying last-mile dominance. This deep-dive shows how dark stores have evolved from backend ops to full-blown frontline strategy. The race for street-level supremacy is just getting started.
Scaling is sexy till you meet your balance sheet. Xpressbees clocked ₹2,831 Cr revenue but still managed to torch ₹200 Cr in losses. IPO dreams are still alive, but in logistics, profits move slower than Bangalore traffic.
Meesho is quietly out-ordering everyone. According to a fresh CLSA report, Meesho is clocking a $6.2B GMV run-rate and handling ~5M daily orders- more than Flipkart and Amazon combined. Yup, the ₹199 T-shirt app is now India’s volume king. Ignore it at your peril.
Reliance Retail’s digital muscle is quietly exploding. ICYMI, Reliance’s new commerce and digital segments now drive 18% of total revenue. That’s not a bet anymore, it’s a full-stack blitzkrieg. D2C founders, you're not competing with startups anymore. You're staring down Reliance’s war machine in tier-2 India. Get ready.
🍕 D2C Snippets
Good Monk just sprinkled some serious starter fuel. The company scooped up $2M in a pre-Series A to sneak health into India's junk food obsession. Their mission? Guilt-free eating without sounding like a TED Talk. Functional foods are blowing up; Good Monk’s trying to be the brand that your mom and your gym bro swear by.
MyDesignation just threw shade at the marketplace mafia. While most brands play both D2C & marketplace games, MyDesignation raised $1.25M to own the journey end-to-end. 500K users, a 35% repeat rate, and not a single checkout outsourced to Amazon or Myntra. In D2C fashion, loyalty is rare. Building it without platform support? That’s playing on hard mode.
Snack attack: Phab is bulking up and has raised $2M in seed funding to crank up its snack game- because India still isn’t full. Smart move? Healthier munchies are the new VC catnip. Also, can someone explain why every second D2C brand sounds like a Marvel villain now?
Boult Audio has hit beast mode in FY24. The company clocked ₹697 Cr+ in revenue, up 40% YoY- even as profits took a hit. D2C in gadgets isn’t dead, it’s just getting more brutal. Boult’s secret? Aggressive channel play + being “good enough” at half the Apple flex price. Volume beats vanity.
The Honasa vs HUL sunscreen wars got court-splashed. Tired: skincare ads. Wired: skincare lawsuits. Honasa Consumer and HUL just kissed and made up after a brutal ad fight over Lakmé’s sunscreen campaign. The courtroom drama led to a modified ad, a lot of side-eyes, and a reminder that even D2C unicorns need good lawyers.
📢Power Talk
"All of this is utter nonsense"
Deepinder Goyal, Founder Eternal (Zomato)
📚 Reads & Recos
Credit card spends are partying like it’s pre-2020 with swipes crossing ₹21 lakh crore, fuelled by revenge shopping, revenge travel, and revenge life. Why should you care? Because when credit flows, consumption explodes, and D2C founders who align with "aspirational + accessible" are about to ride the wave harder than crypto bros in 2021.
A quick reminder on the top fundings in e-commerce in 2024
Influencers are the new rural sales army. Selling in Tier 2/3 used to mean dusty hoardings and a prayer. Now? Brands are writing influencer marketing playbooks to chase rural India, as internet penetration outpaces retail shelves. Your next big market could be one Instagram story away. Read the shift here.
Online grocery has shifted from panic-buying to permanent cart addiction in the US. Five years post-COVID, US online grocery sales are still flexing hard. March 2025 data shows not just survival, but full-blown evolution.
Gen Z is building a new world order—one aesthetic at a time. 🌎📱From sipping Matcha like monks on TikTok, to snapping Polaroids in their cottagecore fits, Gen Z is remixing the past, the future, and every subculture in between. Check out the new newsletter from Sauce.vc
That’s all for this week! Bye!
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