D2C Insider — the burgeoning community of entreprenuers building direct-to-consumer brands — has drawn up ambitous plans to scale up Indian brands not just in smaller cities of the country but also globally.

Starting as a small Whatsapp group in 2019, D2C Insider community members include brands such as Mamaearth, Boat, Noise, Epigamia, Happilo, Lenskart, Teabox, Sleepycat and Shopify.

“India was always seen as a manufacturing hub. But over the last five to seven years the trend is shifting and we are starting to build successful brands out of the country. A classic example is that of Boat which has replaced the headphones from Chinese brands,” said Kshitij Ladia, one of the founders of D2C India.

Ladia said the vision of D2C Insider is to enable the growth of the ecosystem by providing its community members with support in four key areas — access, network, knowledge and capital.

“Today the community is about 5,000 founders across D2C (direct to consumer) categories. We have over 3,000 plus brands, 500 plus enables and 500 plus investors. By 2025, we want to ensure that we are able to help 10,000 Indian start-ups in their journey of building brands,” he said.

The community is also looking at expanding its presence in tier 2 and 3 locations. “Places like Bombay, Delhi, Bangalore already has a strong ecosystem. What we would now be looking at is how we can help an entrepreneur build their brand from say Assam,” said Ladia.

He said that D2C Insider is doing networking meetups in various cities to enable entrepreneurs to create their networks.

One such meetup has taken place in Calcutta for which Ladia was in the city.

“We are doing a pitchathon wherein five brands are shortlisted who are going to pitch their ideas in front of investors. What we are doing is bringing investors to the founders” he said.

Globally, the community has two chapters in West Asia and South East Asia. Ladia said the plan is to network with more distributors and e-commerce platforms in these countries to help Indian founders expand their brands in the international market.

Ladia highlighted three key challenges that D2C start-ups are facing at present — clutter due to a lack of product and market differentiation, talent acquisition and the need to scale up offline to expand brand presence.