'It is not easy to enter omnichannel, but it is more rewarding'

Of the numerous panel discussions held at the day-long D2C Revolution Summit, one was on 'Decoding the speeding trends and what the future holds for the D2C industry'. Moderated by Gaurav Dhawan, CRO, Times Network, the panel comprised Arjun Vaidya, Co-Founder, V3 Ventures; Vishal Jindal, Founder & CEO, Biryani By Kilo; Abhinav Mathur, Founder, Something’s Brewing; Rohit Chawla, Founder & CEO, Innovis and Midhula Devabhaktuni, Co-Founder & CMO, Mivi.

Speaking on some of the trends in the D2C market that people are encashing on, Vaidya said, "I consider myself one of those experienced D2C founders because we started in 2016 when the perm D2C did not exist. At that time people thought we were crazy to go online. All consumption was mostly happening offline. So, it was a big step forward to go D2C. Over the years, more brands started to build and investors started supporting other brands and consumers started consuming online, the term D2C got coined. In 2019, we grew even further and became mainstream. Then in 2020, the world changed but for our industry, it was a watershed moment. My parents, who had never operated online, were active in the space - placing orders and making online payments. Behaviours started to change. People like us started to believe that offline is dead. We obviously got proven wrong when around mid-2022, everything started reopening and people went back to their old habits and offline came back. So, overall, if you look at that journey, while D2C is now much larger than it was pre-pandemic, offline is back. So, there is much more competition in D2C. And we have some fundamental things that we need to keep in mind in 2023 - one, CAC is at an all-time-high; two, consumers understand products; three, as my dad says, he wants quick delivery, and four, at some scale, offline becomes an important conversation to have for the next leg of scale."

Mathur said, "Discovery is what D2C brands effectively get first and this has only become more accentuated. So, for a lot of brands like us, during Covid transactions were happening online. Now, the discovery has stayed online, but the actual transaction remains online and has also moved to physical spaces. So, that I would say is a big change."

When asked about how omnichannel has shaped his business thoughts, Chawla said, "We are actually not very omnichannel. We are mostly online; 95 per cent of our business is online right now. We do experiment with the concept of offline, but what we have realised is that it is a little expensive to build that channel as well. It seems easy and probably the right thing to do but it takes a lot of time and patience to build that network. Because D2C is very simple, comparatively. You can run an ad and get a transaction very quickly and get instant feedback. But retail and the omnichannel part is a little difficult."

Speaking on omnichannel, Devabhaktuni said, "We were a bootstrapped brand when we started in 2016, so we were very clear going the omnichannel route during the initial years was not for us, especially with electronics. When you walk into a store and you are not an established brand, you are fighting with international brands. You would not get the space that you would need and the promotion that you would need. So, definitely, the online platforms have tremendously helped us in the journey and then D2C we have built after two years. Once we started to establish a brand, we have built an amazing customer experience with our own website and we have only started venturing omnichannel this year because now we see customers walking into the store and asking for MIVI. Now, that is an easy entrant and would help you to get that leverage to maintain or grow in the channel. It is not easy to enter omnichannel but it is more rewarding."

On being asked whether he preferred to operate in the online or offline space for his brand, Jindal said, "Biryani By Kilo is primarily in the cloud kitchen and food delivery business. Having said that, we have always had a dine-in model since 2016-17. so, we do believe that consumer behaviour is different in different cities, like for Mumbai and Delhi where the rentals are higher and the customers do not have time. It does not make sense to have dine-ins. But let's say we are going to a city like Jaipur or Jalandhar or Kanpur or Mysuru, we do make our first outlet a dine-in one. So, it is not one size fits all. Because a customer in Jalandhar will have more time, and I am speaking in a very generalised fashion, than a Mumbai customer. We have 35-40 dine-in outlets in different cities, including Mumbai and Delhi. But having said that, only 10-15 per cent of our business come from dine-in and I think this is a continuous journey from online to offline and vice-versa, which the brands will have to keep taking all through their life cycle depending on which channel is ready and which channel is expensive at that point of time."