With over 190 mn digital shoppers, many of whom are young with disposable income, India now boasts the world’s third-largest online shopping base. Additionally, there’s a growing domestic demand for high quality and good design. Take the beauty and personal care market. Traditionally, high-end brands were synonymous and confined to international lines. We now have the likes Forest Essentials, Kama, even platform Nykaa itself, rushing into that trendy, vogue-sensitive space. Raising the quality bar hand in hand with brand marketing has been instrumental in earning consumer trust in this notoriously difficult space. D2C companies are also bypassing conventional retail distribution models and opting for diverse channels that include pop-up stores and social media partnerships.
Most interestingly, this rise of high-end brands tailored to local requirements – ironically, for a more-than-ever globalised world – represents an organic, more natural, and certainly more successful approach to going local than artificially-induced ‘Buy swadeshi’ campaigns. At the end of the day, what this new success story underlines is that Indian companies building and supplying ‘taste and tastefulness’ speak louder than playing the ‘India is Great’ card to sell Indian products.
