It’s time for us to retire the term “Direct-to-Consumer” or D2C. The phrase is, anyway, a bit long in the tooth, having been used since the days of the dot-com boom.

D2C used to mean selling directly to end customers, rather than selling through retailers or other middlemen. In theory, selling directly to consumers would allow a company to offer both lower prices and maintain higher margins (since it didn’t have to pay commissions to middlemen), having better products sustained through a faster innovation cycle and the ability to sell products through evolving brand stories instead of merely price.

In reality though, few brands are even remotely D2C. For instance, 82% of Boat’s sales come via Amazon and Flipkart, with only 2% selling directly to consumers. The dependence on kiranas, distributors and modern retail has merely been replaced with a dependence on Amazon, Flipkart or Quick Commerce companies.

Large and “traditional” FMCG companies, which were once acquirers of D2C startups, have sobered up. Their acquisitions haven’t really scaled up well, even as they’ve figured out how to compete with D2Cs. As a result, the acquisition premium for D2C startups has plummeted from the peak during the post-pandemic days. In some cases even a 50% discount from the peak isn’t leading to deals.

In terms of categories, electronics has scale, but profits have plummeted. In skincare, there is also a downward spiral of competition and price pressure. A good example is Mamaearth, which is now paying the price on the stock markets.

In terms of competition, the likes of Meesho, Fire-Boltt, Boult, Noise etc., are pushing prices dramatically lower. What is a differentiating factor? It’s hard to say right now. The entire category looks like a turnstile with a 2-3 year cycle.

What is the way out? What should modern brands do to build lasting and sustainable brands? How should they cultivate consumer loyalty and connections? What should they even be called?

Welcome to episode 22 of Two by Two.

In this episode, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by Deepak Shahdadpuri, managing director and founder of DSG Consumer Partners–India and Southeast Asia’s first consumer-focused venture capital fund. We also had Ajai Thandi, co-founder of Sleepy Owl Coffee, and Seetharaman G, deputy editor at The Ken and resident expert on all things retail, joining the discussion.

The full episode, which we released on 19 December 2024, is exclusively available on The Ken app with a Premium subscription and on Apple Podcasts via a separate standalone subscription.

There is also a free Two by Two newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

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Additional reading:

Boat, Noise unleashed cheap smartwatches on India. Rivals hurt them with dirt-cheap ones

Mamaearth sold investors on its FMCG dreams. Consumers had other plans

Brands once desperate for quick commerce now have a tiger by the tail

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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN did the mixing and mastering for this episode.

Write to us at [email protected] and tell us what you thought of the episode.

Business schools are among the most coveted higher educational institutions. Students go through some of the most competitive exams and pay significant fees because they hope that at the end of their degree, they will get a great job.

Yet, the onerous process of finding, soliciting and bringing dozens of companies to campuses each year falls mostly on final-year students, who are part of elected/selected placement committees.

For as long as we can remember, these committees have always been accused of bias, arrogance and powerplay by other students.

Yet, the fact also remains that those on the placement committees sacrifice a significant part of their education and grades in order to run a great job-matching process for their entire batch.

Should they, though?

In the US, for instance, most leading B-schools have their professional teams that run the entire campus hiring process instead of students. Finding quality jobs for hundreds of students each year is a full-time job.

In India, too, many colleges are gradually coming around to the same POV.

IIM Kozhikode has transitioned the process from students to faculty. This model aims to instil transparency and professionalism in what vice-chancellor V Ramgopal Rao calls “a crucial rite of passage marking the end of academic life.”

BITS Pilani has adopted a system where HR professionals employed by the institute handle placements.

IIT Bombay set up a committee under a senior computer science faculty professor Uday Khedkar, with one of its aims being “setting up a clean and transparent placement process system”. Sources at IIT-B said the panel was set up after students brought to light instances of the biases some faced and how this had hampered their careers.

Our guest for the episode is Professor Varun Nagaraj, Dean and Professor of Information Management & Analytics at S P Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai. He holds a Ph.D. in Management: Designing Sustainable Systems from Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management. He also holds an MBA from Boston University, an MS in Computer Engineering from North Carolina State University, and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Bombay. His career spanning over three decades in digital products reflects his passion for product management, development, and innovation.

Over the course of the discussion, the professor and hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan discuss how placements have evolved since their MBA days, their misgivings about the current system, and what institutes have to get better at.

Perhaps the larger question is, how should we think about matching employers and graduates? Is a compressed “placements” process the best way?

Welcome to episode 25 of Two by Two.

—

Additional reading:

Bias, lack of transparency trips job hunts in premier schools

Why are IIT placements failing to deliver jobs? Former IIT Director explains

Shiv Shivakumar's LinkedIn post

 —

This is a shorter '10-minute trailer' cut from the hour-long discussion hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar had with the guests. If you would like to listen to the full episode, you can do that by getting a Premium subscription to The Ken, which, in addition to Two by Two, will get you access to all our long-form stories, newsletters, visual stories and the rest of the podcasts we produce.

But if you just want to sample full episodes of Two by Two, you can do that by getting a Premium subscription on Apple Podcasts at a great monthly price.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with like-minded individuals who would be interested in listening to the episode. And if you have more thoughts on the discussion, we’d love to hear your arguments as well. You can write to us at [email protected]

Artificial intelligence will affect all facets of modern-day business in some way or another. But it will most definitely go a few layers deeper with the type of companies whose job is to be a record of business’ today – SaaS companies.

SaaS as a business model is investment-heavy in the beginning. It’s risky to build, it takes time to build, and it takes skill to build. But if successful, it is a cash cow. Think of the biggest SaaS companies – Salesforce, Microsoft and Adobe. They spent years building and iterating on software products. And today, all of these products they poured money into make them billions of dollars.

But there’s a perfect storm that has been turning the tides, and the incumbents have seen the signs and have jumped at it to secure their advantage and not lose out to upstarts.

The one thing about SaaS products is that they have to be constantly sold to their customers. But with AI, the entire loop becomes a solution that makes the customer’s life easier. SaaS products integrated with AI will be bought because they’ll solve the use case of its customers specifically. Companies which usually resort to different pricing strategies for small additional features will have to reconsider and be aligned to deliver outcomes for their customer, not a feature list which is based on purchasing licences to gain access.

And in all of this, what happens to the Indian SaaS companies as the AI wave ushers in?

In episode 21 of Two by Two, hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar sat down with guests Sumanth Raghavendra, CEO and co-founder of Presentations.AI and one of the co-founders of The Ken, and Sidu Ponnappa, CEO and co-founder of Realfast and former managing director of Gojek India.

This is a '30-minute version' of the full conversation we had published on 12 December 2024. Full episodes are available to Premium subscribers on The Ken app and Apple Podcasts with a separate monthly subscription.

A Premium subscription to The Ken will get you access to our long-form stories, premium newsletters, podcasts, and visual stories in addition to Two by Two.

If you’d just like access to Two by Two, you can do that too by getting a Premium subscription to Two by Two on Apple Podcasts.

Tune in to the latest Two by Two podcast to listen to an engrossing discussion on how AI will shake up SaaS models across the world and what’s in store for India’s SaaS companies.

——

Additional reading:

The AI apocalypse is coming: Are SaaS companies ready?

BarbAIrians at the Gate: The Financial Opportunity of AI

The End of the SaaS Era: Rethinking software’s role in business

——

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Mixing and mastering for this episode was done by Rajiv CN.

Write to us with what you thought of the episode at [email protected].

In 2023, two-wheelers and three-wheelers in India experienced growth of around 37% and 66%. Electric four-wheelers also promised to go down the same path because in that same year, there was a significant increase in sales of electric four-wheelers, 113%.

Now, of course, this is from a lower base, but the signs were clear.

The conventional wisdom or the narrative has been petrol and diesel cars are going to become a relic of the past. And if you're an automaker and if you're not investing billions of dollars in developing battery technology or newer models with all of this stuff, you are seen as out of touch with reality.

Essentially, electric cars were inevitable.

In 2024, something changed. Demand and sales for electric cars have fallen all over the world. For the first time in almost 12 years, Tesla's sales dropped by 1.1%. And India is also no exception.

If you look at 2024 numbers, in fact, until October 2024, sales of electric four-wheeler cars in India were actually declining. They had gone down if you compare year-on-year numbers all of these months. By the end of the year, it sort of increased a little bit which was helped by a sale of one specific model called MG Windsor and some price cuts.

But in this episode, we're going to pose two questions: Number one, why did electric cars become less attractive? And two, what will make electric cars inevitable again and by when?

Our first guest is Dr Amitabh Saran, founder and CEO of Altigreen Propulsion Labs. Saran used to work at companies like Tata Consultancy Services, Philips, NASA, and Hewlett Packard before turning to entrepreneurship.

Our second guest is Awadhesh Jha, executive director of Glida India, formerly known as Fortum Charge and Drive India, which is a leading charging solution provider in India. In fact, if you live in Delhi, you will see Glida charging points all over Delhi.

Jha has a long history in power. He used to be a deputy director at the Central Water Commission. Also, he was the vice president of Hindustan Powerprojects Limited, where he administered hydropower development in one of the remotest parts of the country, the Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh.

Welcome to episode 24 of Two by Two.

–

Take the survey here:

Two by Two: Events in India vs abroad - https://theken.typeform.com/to/pchJxlaj

–
This is a shorter '10-minute trailer' cut from the hour-long discussion hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar had with the guests. If you would like to listen to the full episode, you can do that by getting a Premium subscription to The Ken, which, in addition to Two by Two, will get you access to all our long-form stories, newsletters, visual stories and the rest of the podcasts we produce.

But if you just want to sample full episodes of Two by Two, you can do that by getting a Premium subscription on Apple Podcasts at a great monthly price.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.

If you liked this episode of Two by Two, please share it with people who would be interested in listening to the episode. And if you have more thoughts on the discussion, we'd love to hear your arguments as well. You can write to us at [email protected]

Fintech lending was supposed to be the bridge that would enable entrepreneurs, small businesses and even individuals across the country to get access to much-needed credit to build businesses. For millions of small and medium businesses, and even individuals seeking a personal loan, who’d otherwise not qualify for them (usually unsecured ones) from banks, these new-age financial institutions were the great hope and sources of credit.

Then in October this year, the RBI, like it usually seems to do these days, suddenly swept in and took action. It halted the loan disbursement activities of four NBFCs: Asirvad Micro Finance Limited, Arohan Financial Services Limited, DMI Finance Private Limited, and Navi Finserv Limited.  In fact, between the time we recorded this episode to when we released it, the RBI had lifted restrictions from one of these companies - Navi Finserv. 

But why did the RBI do this?

Here are some hints as to why. Here are two quotes from the RBI about why they did this:

“Deviations were also observed in respect of Income Recognition & Asset Classification norms, resulting in evergreening of loans, conduct of gold loan portfolio, mandated disclosure requirements on interest rates and fees, outsourcing of core financial services, etc.”

And here’s the most interesting one:

 
“...unfair and usurious practices continued to be seen during the course of onsite examinations as well as from the data collected and analysed offsite”

That’s what the RBI said.

But what did it not say?

Joining hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan for the discussion are guests Ateesh Tankha and Mithun Sundar. Ateesh Tankha is the founder of Alsowise Content Solutions and a keen observer and critic of the financial services space, and Mithun Sundar is the chief Partner Officer at Microsoft India and a former CEO of Lendingkart.

Throughout our conversation, both Mithun and Ateesh took the time to explain how digital lending works, why private banks are hesitant to enter the ring and play the game themselves, what’s up with the sky-high interest rates charged on these loans, and, of course, why credit is so important for our country's growth and where we’re falling short.

Welcome to episode 20 of Two by Two.

Additional reading:

RBI had better explain why Navi and DMI Finance are locked out of the loan market

For fintechs, RBI is the boy who cries wolf

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This is a shorter '30-minute' episode. If you want to listen and get access to the full episode, consider becoming a Premium subscriber to The Ken, which in addition to Two by Two, will also give you access to our long-form stories, Premiums newsletters and visual stories. Or if you just want to listen to Two by Two for now, for iOS users, we have enabled Premium subscription on Apple Podcasts.

You can also sign up for The Two by Two newsletter here—it's free!

This episode was produced by Hari Krishna. Mixing and mastering for this episode is done by Rajiv CN. Write to us about what you thought of the episode at [email protected].

Amazon India has fallen behind in the e-commerce race to Flipkart and now to Meesho as well, in tier-2 and tier-3 markets. It is the last large player to enter the quick-commerce race in India. Everything that made Amazon largely successful in the U.S. has not fully cut it for them in India, even though they understood India is a very different market and the approach they took in the U.S. might not work well for them here early on

Yet, they have missed out on capitalising on a lot of opportunities because they were slow to react to changing consumer behaviour.

And this losing advantage in some of their verticals makes you think, what are the other businesses where Amazon has a right to win. Is it AWS, streaming or something else? Or will they push forward to make up for the lost opportunities by pouring more money and change their fate.

What does the future hold for Amazon India? And how will the company, famed for its execution, turn things around in India? 

Of course, there have been other regulatory pressures as well, which have halted them from realising their full potential in India and forced them to think outside the business model in which they usually function.

In this episode of Two by Two, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan bring back one of our first guests, Srikanth Rajagopalan, CEO of Perfios Account Aggregation Services and a former ‘Amazonian’, to discuss whether Amazon has lost the e-commerce race in India. Professor Vishal Karungulam, who teaches a breadth of subjects at the Indian School of Business, including software product management, digital innovation, and disruptive technologies, is our second guest.

And they try to uncover over the hour-and-a-half-long discussion where the next big opportunity lies for Amazon India.

Welcome to episode 23 of Two by Two.

This is just 10 minutes from the conversation. But there’s a lot more that we got into in the discussion, including Amazon, the enterprise company, and how Prime and streaming might be moats it might want to rely on.

If you’d like to listen to the full episode, you can head over to The Ken and become a Premium subscriber to catch up on everything else we discussed. Your Premium subscription will also get you access to our long-form stories, newsletters, visual stories and other podcasts that we produce. Or, if you just want to sample full episodes of Two by Two for now, you can do just that by becoming a Premium subscriber on Apple Podcasts at a really great monthly price.

Further reading:

Amazon is not yet in quick commerce. But it’s already different from the pack

Amazon got rid of its largest seller only to replace it with other ‘preferred sellers’

Amazon’s Leadership Principles (recommended by Srikanth)
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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN did the mixing and mastering for this episode.

Write to us at [email protected] and tell us what you thought of the episode and rate the show on your favourite podcast streaming platform.

Today’s episode of Two by Two is about how the marketing function has been eating itself from the inside.

Historically, in companies, marketing has always been about the long term, while a function like sales was about the near term. Marketing owned the customer—what they wanted, their dreams, their fears, and their vanities. It was supposed to tell stories of customers back to the organisation and, in return, tell stories of the company back to customers.

Today, in company after company, the marketing function has been getting sliced away, cut into parts and becoming something else altogether.

Marketing is eating itself from the inside. To discuss what changed, we had two wonderful guests: one who has been teaching marketing for decades and one who has been practising it for decades. Our first guest is Professor YLR Moorthi, who teaches marketing, brand management, and marketing strategy at IIM Bangalore. These days, Professor Moorthi’s work is focused on the impact of branding in different domains like IT and B2B marketing.

Our second guest is Deepali Naair, who is currently the group CMO of CK Birla Group. She’s had a long career in marketing across varied functions as CMO for India and South Asia at IBM, and prior to that, she was CMO at IIFL and Mahindra Holidays.

In this episode, the hosts ask two simple questions: Why is marketing dying, and how can we bring it back?

Welcome to Two by Two.

We published the full, subscriber-version of this on 28th November. It ran an hour and ten minutes. Today, we’re carrying a tightly edited 30-minute version of the same episode. We’ve tried to ensure that you get all the key parts of the full conversation in a tighter format.

If you’d like to listen to the full version, including all the meandering side conversations, banter and background, I’d urge you to become a subscriber. You can subscribe to just Two by Two on Apple Podcasts at a really great monthly price, or subscribe to The Ken’s Premium plan to get Two by Two bundled with the rest of the original feature stories, newsletters, infographics and podcasts we are known for.

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.

New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, and tell us what you think of the show.

You can write to us at [email protected] with your thoughts and suggestions.

Welcome to the year-end special edition of Two by Two.

We’ve released 22 episodes of Two by Two since our inaugural edition in July. 

We’ve covered an incredible breadth of counterintuitive topics framed as, well, two by twos. 

Would Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe became Flipkart? Did Delhi prick Bengaluru’s bubble? Is the golden era of the software engineer over? Why is health insurance broken? How will Ola and Uber avoid ‘death by a thousand cuts’? Why is Zepto behaving like a gold medallist? Can venture capitalists do no wrong? Dmart versus the challengers at the gates. AI and the impending disruption of Indian SaaS. 

We’ve had incredible fun exploring these ideas with a bunch of really sharp, experienced and opinionated guests. 

Finding guests who don’t hesitate to speak their minds and state unpopular truths has been one of the hardest things. Far, far tougher than finding interesting topics. We owe all our guests a huge thanks for trusting us. Far too many professionals and leaders prefer to stick to rehearsed and predictable talking points in public these days.

We’d started Two by Two with the ambition to operate at the intersection of curiosity and synthesis. Each week, we said we’d spot the hidden connections and unasked questions. We’d identify the cast of players and their motivations. 

We’d bring in incredible people to discuss these with. We’d try to answer simple yet fundamental questions like, what is going on, why is it happening, who gains and who loses, and where is all of this leading to?

By always asking questions. Always connecting the dots. Always being unfiltered and uninhibited.

We wanted Two by Two to be ‘your personal investigative brain’. 

In 2025 we hope to make Two by Two even more interesting and unpredictable. Yes, at its core it will still be a weekly podcast. But I’m excited at the possibility of doing so much more by involving our subscribers, listeners and readers in these endeavours. 

We want to make Two by Two ‘our collective investigative brain’. 

And hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan will continue to do so with a new episode every Thursday.

To listen to all episodes of Two by Two, consider subscribing to The Ken’s Premium plan, which in addition to the podcast, will also get you access to our long-form stories, Premium newsletters and visual stories.

If you just want access to Two by Two, you can do that as well on Apple Podcasts with a paid subscription.

Two by Two is also a free weekly newsletter published every Friday. You can sign up for it here.

Listen to all Two by Two episodes here:

1. Will Flipkart become Phonepe before Phonepe becomes Flipkart? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/will-flipkart-become-phonepe-before-phonepe-becomes-flipkart/

2. Why has all the excitement and disruption gone out of startups? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/why-has-all-the-excitement-and-disruption-gone-out-of-startups/

3. Is Zepto a gold medallist or a bronze medallist? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/is-zepto-a-gold-medalist-or-a-bronze-medalist/

4. Delhi pricked the Bengaluru bubble - 

https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/delhi-pricked-the-bangalore-bubble/

5. Swiggy needs to reclaim its past glory - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/swiggy-needs-to-reclaim-its-past-glory/

6. Is the golden era of the (software) engineer over? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/is-the-golden-era-of-the-software-engineer-over/

7. Google Pay: Big. Successful. Vulnerable - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/google-pay-big-successful-vulnerable/

8. Private coaching is eating away at schooling - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/private-coaching-is-eating-away-at-schooling/

9. Why Stripe could not become the Stripe of India? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/why-couldnt-stripe-become-the-stripe-of-india/

10. Health insurance in India is ripe for disruption - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/health-insurance-is-ripe-for-disruption/

11. Netflix and its last growth market - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/netflixs-last-growth-market/

12. Ather Energy was a pioneer. Can it also be a leader? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/ather-energy-was-a-pioneer-can-it-also-be-a-leader/

13. Do we even need Product Managers? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/do-we-even-need-product-managers/

14. How will Ola and Uber avoid ‘death by a thousand cuts’? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/how-will-ola-and-uber-avoid-death-by-a-thousand-cuts/

15. The relentless rise of the government as a competitor - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/the-relentless-rise-of-the-government-as-a-competitor/

16. What does the future hold for Ola Electric? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/what-does-ola-electrics-future-hold/

17. Can venture capitalists do no wrong? - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/can-venture-capitalists-do-no-wrong/

18. Dmart versus the challengers at the gate - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/dmart-versus-the-challengers-at-the-gate/

19. Marketing is eating itself from the inside - https://the-ken.com/podcasts/two-by-two/marketing-is-eating-i...

This episode was first released on November 21, 2024, for The Ken's Premium subscribers. We’ve unlocked it for our Basic and Free subscribers for a limited time. Listen to it on your favourite podcast streaming platforms now.

Dmart, the retail group in India, is absolutely number one on vision, execution, and consistency. Dmart opened its first supermarket in Mumbai’s Powai suburb in 2002. Like Walmart in the US, it adopted a deep discounting strategy, offering its customers low prices every day. Today, it has 381 stores. In spite of offering its customers the deepest discounts, Dmart’s net profit numbers beat the best among its global peers.

Yet analysts and investors have been becoming increasingly bearish of Dmart’s future strategy. They argue that what got it from 2002 to 2024 might not necessarily take it to, say, 2034.

One big reason is quick commerce. Armies of underpaid contract delivery workers rushing from dark stores managed by notionally independent owners on behalf of younger companies like Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto, Big Basket, and even Flipkart are challenging the conventional wisdom on retail.

Forcing Dmart to pause and blink.

What should it do? Stick to what it knows and does best? Or learn new digital and delivery tricks in its middle age? With only an estimated 5% of the $500 billion urban market for food and groceries currently penetrated by organised and modern retail, the way Dmart goes has profound implications for India.

To discuss this, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan invited Govind Shrikhande, former managing director of Shoppers Stop overseeing all its formats, including Shoppers Stop, Hypercity, Crossword, Homestop, Beauty Formats – MAC, Estee Lauder, Air Port & Duty Free Retail etc. Govind has spent over 40 years in the retail sector, having been part of the launches of Denim and Arrow, the relaunch of Vivaldi and the turnaround of Shoppers Stop. He is currently an Independent Director on the Board of a few Companies and a mentor to a few start-ups.

Our other guest is Seetharaman G. Seetha is deputy editor at The Ken and also leads The Ken’s coverage of retail. He’s written quite a few stories on Dmart over the years as well.

Welcome to episode number 18 of Two by Two!

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Two by Two episodes referenced in this episode:

Is Zepto a gold medallist or a bronze medallist?

Swiggy needs to reclaim its past glory

Stories and newsletters referenced in this episode:

Dmart and the supersizing imperative

Zudio wanted Dmart’s apparel shoppers. Now Dmart is hurting

Dmart changes its mind on store size. Again

Dmart is not used to being in a funk for so long

What if the quick-commerce warehouse was a supermarket?

Dmart and investors rekindle their love

Dmart’s e-commerce bet has gone from counterintuitive to obsolete

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This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN, our resident sound engineer, mixed and mastered this episode.

New episodes are released every Thursday. So follow the show wherever you get your podcasts, and tell us what you think of the show.

You can write to us at [email protected] with your thoughts and suggestions.

It’s time for us to retire the term “Direct-to-Consumer” or D2C. The phrase is, anyway, a bit long in the tooth, having been used since the days of the dot-com boom.

D2C used to mean selling directly to end customers, rather than selling through retailers or other middlemen. In theory, selling directly to consumers would allow a company to offer both lower prices and maintain higher margins (since it didn’t have to pay commissions to middlemen), having better products sustained through a faster innovation cycle and the ability to sell products through evolving brand stories instead of merely price.

In reality though, few brands are even remotely D2C. For instance, 82% of Boat’s sales come via Amazon and Flipkart, with only 2% selling directly to consumers. The dependence on kiranas, distributors and modern retail has merely been replaced with a dependence on Amazon, Flipkart or Quick Commerce companies.

Large and “traditional” FMCG companies, which were once acquirers of D2C startups, have sobered up. Their acquisitions haven’t really scaled up well, even as they’ve figured out how to compete with D2Cs. As a result, the acquisition premium for D2C startups has plummeted from the peak during the post-pandemic days. In some cases even a 50% discount from the peak isn’t leading to deals.

In terms of categories, electronics has scale, but profits have plummeted. In skincare, there is also a downward spiral of competition and price pressure. A good example is Mamaearth, which is now paying the price on the stock markets.

In terms of competition, the likes of Meesho, Fire-Boltt, Boult, Noise etc., are pushing prices dramatically lower. What is a differentiating factor? It’s hard to say right now. The entire category looks like a turnstile with a 2-3 year cycle.

What is the way out? What should modern brands do to build lasting and sustainable brands? How should they cultivate consumer loyalty and connections? What should they even be called?

Welcome to episode 22 of Two by Two.

In this episode, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan are joined by Deepak Shahdadpuri, managing director and founder of DSG Consumer Partners–India and Southeast Asia's first consumer-focused venture capital fund. We also had Ajai Thandi, co-founder of Sleepy Owl Coffee and Seetharaman G, deputy editor at The Ken and resident expert on all things retail joining in for the discussion.

This is a short excerpt from a more than hour-long episode.

The full episode is exclusively available on The Ken app with a Premium subscription and on Apple Podcasts via a separate standalone subscription.

There is also a free Two by Two newsletter. You can sign up for it here.

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Additional reading:

Boat, Noise unleashed cheap smartwatches on India. Rivals hurt them with dirt-cheap ones

Mamaearth sold investors on its FMCG dreams. Consumers had other plans

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If you’ve been a regular listener of Two by Two, consider following the show wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a rating too. You can also write to us at [email protected].

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Hari Krishna. Rajiv CN did the mixing and mastering for this episode.

We’ll be back next Thursday with a new episode. See you then.