A direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand is a brand that sells to its customers through its own website and app, not through a shop or a marketplace. Examples include the mattress delivered in a box, skincare and beauty lines, jewellery and eyeglasses bought online, nutrition supplements, and milk delivered every morning.
A brand can reach you in three ways. It can sell through a shop, which buys its goods and sells them to you. It can list its goods on an online marketplace. Or it can sell to you directly. Only the direct route tells the brand who bought what, and when. A shop or a marketplace knows its customers, but it does not share their details with the brand.
That knowledge is the D2C brand's main advantage. Data that a company collects itself, from its own app, website and stores, is called first-party data. Take, for example, a skincare brand. A customer in Bhopal buys a 50 ml sunscreen on its website on 3 February. The brand's customer data platform (CDP) records the purchase in her profile. The brand knows that a 50 ml tube lasts most buyers about 60 days. So on day 50, its customer engagement platform sends her a WhatsApp message with a link to reorder. She taps the link, the checkout already has her address, and she pays in one step through one-click checkout. Every order adds to the data, so the next reminder can come at a better time.
To sell directly, a brand needs software and marketing. It builds its website on an e-commerce platform, and adds apps for search, reviews, subscriptions and order tracking. The page on D2C e-commerce covers this toolkit. The brand must also bring every customer to its site itself, usually by paying for ads on social media and search engines. That is often its biggest cost.
Many Indian buyers prefer to pay cash on delivery. Some of them refuse the parcel at the door, and the brand then pays for shipping both ways. The page on cash on delivery and RTO explains this cost, which matters a lot to a young D2C brand.
Most D2C brands do not sell only directly. Many also list on the big marketplaces, to reach more buyers, and many of India's D2C brands are now opening their own stores. Some sell by subscription, such as milk and grocery subscriptions. Others rent their products out, as in furniture rental.