Getting Started Building An Indian D2c Brand Episode 1

How do you create a brand in such a tough Indian D2C market? Welcome to the first episode of our series in which we give you a behindthescenes look at our attempt to break into this cluttered Indian D2C brand market. We’ll give you a rare glimpse of what happens behind closed doors as we guide our client Amala’s Couture and shadow our execution and marketing heads Yogesh and Rahul through the entire branding and marketing process. Want to know how we do it? Hit subscribe and follow along. This is building an Indian D2C brand.

We are Simple Plan Media, a branding and web design consultancy based right here in New Delhi, India. Since 2015, we’ve been supporting and working with brands on their 0 to1 journey. In a marketplace full of noise, we believe in the power of simplicity. Through thoughtful design and strategic marketing, we help brands find their authentic voice in an ever evolving marketplace.

Situated at the heart of Oscar’s village, Delhi and primarily driven by their offline store, Shrudi and Santo have been operating their brand Amulas Couture which designs and create custom lehenas and traditional Indian wedding wear for women. Hi, I’m Yogesh and I’m the execution head at Central Media. Hi, I’m Rahul and I’m a brand consultant out here. So the Amultas team got in touch with our business team. They provide a brief about what they want to do and the founders were very keen to work with us but the price point might be an issue. When you were talking to me about this project, I didn’t take it very seriously because again we don’t generally work with Indian D2C brands. I always wanted to because I wanted to like build a brand that can make an impact locally because we are based out of Delhi and if you can build a brand that is Delhi based it’ll be fun. They wanted to make this work the kind of handcrafted work they are creating more accessible to the population and they feel like it’s a designer mafia sort of a situation where you can charge as much as you want just because you have a label. The beauty of the brand was that it wasn’t a primarily D2C brand. They had a retail store as well. Now they wanted to introduce a new line to scale the brand.

Before we dive deep into what branding is, let’s talk about what is a brand. A brand is a feeling because it exists in consumer’s mind. It’s not a real entity. It’s an ethereal concept. And when enough people feel the same way about your products or services, you have a brand. Otherwise, it’s just a commodity or a service that you are selling. Since brand is a feeling, branding is the act of managing those feelings. It can be done through messaging. So, what you say, how you say it, aesthetics, the look and feel, and the actual experience. So once the customer lands on the website, your social media, the unboxing experience, talking to your customer support, all these different elements build or convey a certain sort of a feeling. Branding is the act of managing those feelings.

Through their masterful blend of heritage and contemporary design. Shuty and Santosh have been operating Amalas with attention to detail, passion and grit. But now it’s time for their next challenge. Taking it to the next level by making their brand more accessible and taking it online.

So they had a very unique take to it. They wanted to challenge the status quo of the designer wear collection that is being thrown around, right? The quality of a premium level or a luxury label brand at pricing which is accessible to everyday women. They wanted to make this work, the kind of handcrafted work they are creating more accessible to the population. So we decided let’s let’s have a chat with the founders and see where it goes. We were blown away by the energy of the founders.

I was born in Hoska’s village, born and brought up. Designers was not really a thing back then. And uh that’s where I saw intricate embroideries and uh you know uh the art of hand embroidery and the art of India which was honestly not something that you would come across if you went to smaller markets like Lajpatar or even a Chani Chalk back then. It was definitely the first dream I had that yes this is something that I want to do with my life. My school is also like literally a kilometer away and right now I live a kilometer away. So I’ve been in this small radius my entire life and that’s what destiny is.

Santo you know the kind of experience and discipline that he brings. He’s a he’s such a hard worker and his grasp is so so quick. I mean in a month he was able to understand this business from from top to bottom.

Not 2012 I joined the army been at the worst circumstances were play good places also and that too very few actually volunteer by themselves to get into Paris and I did and it’s a very grueling session of these three months that you have to undergo to be actually selected get selected in it. Soon as I met Suti wherein she already had started this journey of Amaltas, we were like let’s let’s do big. Initially it was only limited to scaling up the business but later we felt like probably there was more to do with it as it as the bridal industry is a very seasonal business. We don’t want to do the exact thing as to what uh the other players do in the market. Let’s do everything. So there was not a definite path that we were uh actually uh looking at which is a wrong way to look at the business.

So they had a very good label. They had a very good production. They had beautiful designers who were designing such beautiful designs. But they weren’t able to create a business that runs across the year. Which is why they wanted a sort of like a rebrand of the business, restructuring of the business. If we do a rebrand and this brand already speaks to a certain sort of set of audience, then how do we structure a new range of products? The pricing of it is too off. It would be disorienting for the existing customers when they see one product is priced at 50,000 another one lakh and then another line of products 7,000 5,000 7,000 if we are creating a new line that is catering to a larger population that would conflict with the core ethos of the existing brand. So we decided that a new brand, a new D2C brand would be the best possible way to move forward with this.

Whenever a brand or a organization wants to launch a new range of products or services or something that is that is very different from what they have been doing and it’s different in terms of the tonality uh the the messaging and how this new range of products needs to communicate with the end users then generally a subbrand is created so that the original brand’s tonality and the messaging and the visual look and feel isn’t diluted. A relevant example is Nexa. So Maruti Suzuki has been relevant in the market since so many years and they came out with Nexa just because it was targeting a very different set of audience. They wanted to create a premium brand for the cars which people didn’t resonate Maruti Suzuki with because that was a more affordable brand for everyday audience. So that’s in essence what a subbrand is. You don’t want to dilute the original brand. You want a very focused a hyperfocused new brand. So you create a subbrand that is a little different.

So after the meeting we thought like again we love their personality and we believed in the vision. This was something we wanted to be a part of but the price point might be an issue and that’s when we got creative and that’s when the idea of documenting this series came up and this wasn’t something that we are reinventing a wheel when we launched future had already done something like this and it was such a valuable resource for so many founders and as soon as we saw it at that point of time it was like an industry gold standard like how detailed process everyone can show like I’m sure our process was already very aligned to that but the sheer audacity to open the doors and tell it to the world that this is a real process. So we thought of why not build this for the Indian context. We knew that we had to if we had to work with them we we needed to get a lot creative. Yeah I think we don’t operate in the same price bracket. So that’s why we thought, okay, let’s finally make a video series.

In the next episode, through the discovery session, we’ll dive deeper into Amalas’s core business needs and uncover the less visible aspects of their brand. We’ll use the information attained in the discovery session to pave the way ahead and create strategy and art directions, which eventually helps in designing what our logo would look like. Stay tuned for our next episode and hit subscribe. This is building an Indian D2C brand.