How We Built an Inelastic Brand by Sacrificing TAM

Strategy Case Study: The Cinnamon Kitchen
Ritesh - founder, Porcellia & Manzuri
March 15, 2025
5 min read

Most people think D2C success is about better creatives, better funnels, or the right agency.

It’s not. (well maybe it is a bit but that all comes MUCH later)

It’s about strategy.

This is a story about how we took The Cinnamon Kitchen, a vegan and gluten-free bakery doing less than ₹2L a month (with zero website), and turned it into a high-converting, premium-priced, inelastic brand with 60% repeat customers, high ROAS, and a story that people actually care about.

Let’s break it down.

📌 Background

What is the business?

The Cinnamon Kitchen is a plant-based, gluten-free bakery brand founded by Priyasha Saluja. It started with a simple mission: making better, healthier bakery goods.

What category is it playing in?

Plant-based, gluten-free, clean-label, and “healthy” desserts.

What was the situation?

They had:

  • No website
  • ₹1.5–2L monthly revenue
  • Decent products
  • And a founder with a powerful story…

But we had a problem.

Gluten-free and plant-based are no longer differentiators.

The market was saturated. Every new-age bakery was screaming clean-label, vegan, gluten-free. And honestly? Nobody cared.

There was no reason to choose The Cinnamon Kitchen over the other dozen brands doing the same thing.

🧠 Strategy Argument

What’s the status quo?

Most gluten-free/vegan brands are fighting a losing battle — screaming the same “healthy” benefits, playing pricing wars, and competing for the same TAM.

Why does this suck?

Because when everyone is doing the same thing, the only way to win is either to be:

  1. Cheaper (bad idea),
  2. Louder (expensive idea),
  3. Or truly different (rare idea).

The secret we realised?

We didn’t need to be better. We needed to be the only.

We leaned into something nobody else was doing: repositioning The Cinnamon Kitchen as India’s first PCOS-friendly bakery.

Priyasha Saluja - Founder of The Cinnamon Kitchen

This wasn’t some clever positioning trick.

This came from the founder’s own story. Priyasha has PCOS. She struggled with food intolerances for years. Through her own healing, she learned something critical:

Dairy + Gluten together = a hormonal disaster for women with PCOS.

Once we discovered this, everything clicked.

We weren't a gluten-free bakery anymore.

We were a life-enhancing brand for 60% of Indian women. (60% women in India have PCOS)

What does this enable us to do?

This changed everything:

  • We sacrificed TAM to gain customer love.
  • That love gave us higher ROAS.
  • Higher ROAS gave us profitability early.
  • Profitability gave us room to test and experiment.
  • Experiments gave us velocity and momentum.

And because the product was actually bloody amazing, our repeat % soared to 60%+ within a year of launching.

It also allowed us to charge a 50–70% premium over our competitors. Because if a woman with PCOS sees two gluten-free products, and only one is PCOS-safe, she’s picking the safer one — even if it costs more.

All. Because. Of. Strategy.

What’s the benefit to the customer?

She’s not buying “healthy dessert.”

She’s buying trust.

She’s buying relief from years of restriction, guilt, bloating, or skin issues.

She’s buying a moment of indulgence she doesn’t have to second guess.

💥 Strategy Statement

We are the only
plant-based bakery in India
who offer
100% PCOS-safe desserts made without dairy, gluten, or hormonal disruptors
by
leaning into a founder-led story, medical truth, and nutritional science.

Sexy shorthand: “PCOS-Friendly Bakery”

🚀 The Inelastic Framework in Action

If you’ve been around me long enough, you’ve heard of our Anti-Elastic Growth Framework — the idea that the strongest brands are the ones where price elasticity doesn’t matter. This means that ideally, you should be able to continually keep increasing the prices of your products without sacrificing conversion rates and revenue.

The Cinnamon Kitchen lives this out in real-time.

We can:

  • Raise prices and not lose customers.
  • Scale ad spend and not bleed cash.
  • Acquire new customers and convert them fast.

Why? Because our differentiation is rooted in sacrifice.

Most brands try to be for everyone. We decided to be only for women with PCOS.

This narrowed our TAM. But it 10x’d our conversion rates.

That’s the paradox most founders don’t get:

If you want more people to love you, you have to be okay with alienating others.

That’s how you win in 2025.

📈 What Happened Next?

  • We went from no website to a full-fledged Shopify D2C store.
  • Ad ROAS on Meta started at 4x+ — with 0 creative fatigue.
  • AOV went up because people trusted the brand to be safe.
  • Retention started kicking in within 60 days.

And within a few months of launch , TCK felt like a real brand — not a “healthy dessert” commodity.

🎯 Final Word

The best part?

We didn’t change the product.

We didn’t hire a big agency.

We didn’t spend crores on influencers.

We just rewrote the story.

And when you get the story right, everything else becomes easier.

That’s strategy.

If you’re a D2C founder stuck at ₹2–5L MRR wondering why your amazing product isn’t scaling — don’t fix your ads.

Fix your positioning.

I’ll say it again: don’t be better. Be the only.

Most brands aren’t stuck because of bad ads.
They’re stuck because they’re not positioned to win.
Because they’re playing in a crowded space with a forgettable story.

And until you fix that,
➡️ Scaling will always feel like a grind.
➡️ Your creatives will fatigue faster.
➡️ Your conversion rates will stay average.
➡️ Your repeat % will never cross that magic 30-40%.

You don’t need a better agency.
You need a better lens.

At Porcellia, we don’t just plug leaks.
We rewire the foundation — so that growth becomes frictionless.

If you’re doing ₹5L–200L MRR and know your product deserves better results…

📞 Book a free strategy call.

We’ll help you find your stardust.

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