Direct-to-Retail

Wherehouse’s growth depended on two things.

Either we kept adding new brands, or the brands already using us kept growing. The first was always in our control. The second wasn’t.

Over time, we started noticing that many of the brands weren’t growing nearly as quickly as we had expected. Waiting for existing brands to scale meant waiting for warehouse utilisation to improve.

Vaibhav came up with the idea of Direct-to-Retail.

We already had warehouses, inventory, logistics and relationships with brands. We had the infrastructure. What we didn’t have was control over how much demand those brands generated.

Instead of waiting for D2C orders to grow, the idea was to use what we already had to build another channel.

That became Direct-to-Retail.

The business was different from our original D2C model. We now had to figure out which products made sense for which retail stores, how the sales process should work, how orders would move through the warehouses and what software we needed to support it.

I was involved across the new vertical as it took shape. That included operations, sales, hiring, pricing, KPIs and the software we needed to run the business. There wasn’t much of a playbook to follow, so many of those processes had to be figured out while the business was already running.

Within six months, Direct-to-Retail was doing around ₹1 crore in monthly GMV.

We had found another way to grow the business without depending entirely on the brands already using us to generate more D2C orders.