Since 2019, the channels changed — the fundamentals didn’t.
A few years ago, scaling a D2C brand in India was comparatively simple: run Meta ads, work with a few influencers, keep customer acquisition cost low because competition for the same audience was still thin. That environment is gone. India’s D2C space now has 800-plus active brands competing for attention on the same handful of platforms, and the easy wins from 2019–2021 don’t repeat themselves the same way anymore.
What’s genuinely different now
Meta used to comfortably absorb 70–80% of a brand’s performance budget. That allocation has fallen closer to 40–50% for most serious D2C brands today, with the rest split across Google, retention channels, and increasingly, AI-driven discovery — a growing share of buying journeys now start inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI-generated results rather than a traditional search or social feed. Investors funding D2C brands have also shifted what they reward: 2026 term sheets increasingly prioritise contribution margin over pure revenue growth, which has pushed brands away from growth-at-any-cost spending and toward disciplined, profitable acquisition.
What hasn’t moved at all
- A written scope beats a verbal promise — every single time, regardless of which channel is in fashion
- Retention still compounds faster than acquisition — a brand with a strong second-purchase rate can afford to spend more acquiring the first one
- Honest positioning outperforms clever positioning — especially in trust-first categories like wellness and Ayurveda, where a customer’s first purchase is really a bet on whether you’re telling the truth
- One accountable team beats five specialists who’ve never spoken to each other — coordination, not raw channel expertise, is usually the actual bottleneck
The honest version of this lesson
The specific tactics that worked in 2019 — cheap Meta CPMs, influencer gifting for reach, aggressive discounting to build initial volume — mostly don’t work the same way today. What’s carried through every year since is far less exciting to talk about: a real scope agreed in writing, spend that’s tracked to an actual sale rather than a click, and a team that owns the whole customer journey instead of just their one slice of it. Channels will keep changing. That discipline is what actually compounds.
