It’s only July and 2024 has been quite the whirlwind for Indian D2C brands. From February’s fake order fiasco, to Meta’s multiple outages, to Google’s brutal SEO updates, the Gods of ecom have not been kind to smaller businesses this year….or so you would like to think.
While there are some things we can control and some we can’t, one key factor that differentiates winners from losers is how well-prepared they are for these tough times. Your business health is not defined by how good your good days are. On the contrary, the lesser worse your bad days are, the more ahead of the competition you’ll be.
This has been my biggest takeaway from 2024. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
The Old E-commerce Playbook: Time to Move On
Remember when e-commerce was all about:
High Margins + Low Prices: Selling cheap and pocketing big margins was the norm.
Free Shipping + Discounts: Offering free shipping and big discounts to lure customers.
Optimized Ad Account: Tweaking your ads to squeeze every bit of ROI.
One-time Purchases: Focusing on getting as many single transactions as possible.
Throw a bunch of ads on Meta and get easy sales.
The New E-commerce Playbook: What’s Working Now
Fast forward to today, and successful e-commerce looks quite different. Here’s what’s hot right now:
Creative Content: It's not just about selling a product; it's about telling a story that resonates.
Memberships and Subscription Services: Building a loyal customer base with regular, recurring revenue. [While this does not work that well in India, communities go a long way. Even simple whatsapp communities]
High Margins + High Quality: People are willing to pay more for quality.
Whale Customers and High LTV: Focusing on customers who spend more over time and increase their lifetime value.
Bundles + Free Shipping Thresholds: Encouraging customers to buy more by offering deals on bundles and setting free shipping thresholds. [Goal is to keep increasing your AOV MOM]
The more a brand pays attention to activities OUTSIDE of performance marketing, the higher chance of survival and thrival it has. What was earlier reserved for "advanced" marketers, is now becoming the normal for all brands.
Retention focused acquisition strategy
Omnichannel is key
Brands which invest the highest in education win.
Reddit is a sleeping Giant.
SEO may be dying but something new is about to take its place. keep watching this space.
Whatsapp chatbots are a hidden goldmine of opportunity.
A/B testing landing pages is about to go mainstream.
Loyalty programs are underrated and underutilised.
2025 will be the year whenFounder lead marketing takes over.
There is a right way to do discounting. learn it so that you don't bleed.
Conversion rate optimisation is going to blow up unlike anything before.
Leverage the Shopify universe's abundant & evergrowing tech stack.
Before You Freak Out: The Old Stuff Still Matters
Hold up, don’t throw out everything just yet. Some of the old tricks still work:
High Margins and Competitive Pricing: You still need to keep your margins healthy and prices attractive.
Free Shipping and Discounts: These are still great tools when used strategically. Just don’t overdo them.
Effective Media Buying: A well-optimized ad account is still key to driving traffic.
Viral Products: Having that one standout product that catches fire can still be a game-changer.
Mastering the New Playbook: What You Need to Focus On
So, what should you be doing now to win in e-commerce? Here are the must-haves:
Creative That Speaks to Your Audience: Develop content that connects emotionally with your customers. Authenticity is key.
Optimized Checkout Experiences: Make the checkout process as smooth as possible to maximize average order value (AOV). Offer upsells and make it easy. CRO CRO CRO CRO
Building Communities and Memberships: Create a sense of belonging. Communities and memberships can significantly boost lifetime value (LTV).
Leveraging Zero-Party Data: Use data that customers willingly provide to personalize their experience and fine-tune your marketing.
The Risks of Sticking to the Old Model
Brands that refuse to adapt are running into big problems:
High Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC): It’s getting more expensive to attract new customers.
Unsustainable Spending: Old strategies lead to high costs and low returns.
Consumer Disengagement: Today’s shoppers want more than just low prices—they’re looking for quality, community, and a connection with the brands they buy from. (see dwindling retention rates quarter on quarter? You know where the problem lies.)
Wrapping It Up
The e-commerce landscape is evolving, and the strategies that worked in the past aren’t enough anymore. To stay ahead, you need to embrace creativity, build loyal communities, and focus on high-quality products and customer experiences. Relying on agencies alone is not enough, and founders NEED to get into the battle-field to get their hands dirty. The marketing ecosystem is evolving at a rate faster than ever before and unless one of the founders of a business is directly on top of this universe, your brand will get left behind.
If you made it all the way here, you'll be glad to know that Porcellia is not really an agency, but more like your fractional co-founder. We're the ideal marketing partner for someone who does not come from a core consumer/marketing background and if you're a D2C brand creating real value and making a difference in unchartered territories, we'd love to speak with you!
Read our latest blog
Your business will die because you can’t tell a story.
In a world optimized for speed and dopamine, meaning is the only thing that lasts.
Real growth lessons from brands making the rules up.
Get your hands on the the stuff that actually compounds. Positioning. Retention. Content. Community.
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We work very differently with founders at different stages. Pick the one that fits — we'll take you to the right place.
The work looks different at each stage. Pick the one that's honest.
Pre PMF · 0 → 1
You're still figuring out what works.
That's exactly where we start.
Does this sound like you?
Zero-to-one looks different for different founders. But it almost always falls into one of these two places.
a) You've launched. You're spending. But nothing feels certain yet.
This is where most of our zero-to-one founders are. You have a website. You're doing ₹1–10L/month. You're running Meta or Google at ₹1–2L/month. Revenue is coming in, but you can't explain exactly why people buy, and you're not confident that turning off ads wouldn't stop the business.
Ask yourself
Do you understand why your customers are buying — beyond discounts or ads?
Are you using creatives to generate insights about your customers, or just to chase ROAS?
If you turned off paid tomorrow, would anything still move?
If you 5xed your budget overnight, would you feel more excitement or dread?
b) You haven't launched yet — but you're serious.
A smaller group of founders come to us before they've spent a rupee on acquisition. If this is you, the bar is higher. We need to see full-time intent, your business creating genuine value, and a willingness to invest in strategy before execution.
Ask yourself
Are you willing to invest in strategy before pouring money into execution?
Are you building something with a fresh point of view and are ahead of time for your category?
If either of these feels accurate, keep reading.
"Porcellia helps brands grow without increasing ad spend."
That's true. But it's also the most misunderstood part of what we do.
If you're here, you probably expect us to:
Reduce your ad spend
Improve your creatives
Bring in organic traffic
Fix performance marketing
We do all of that. But if that's why you're here, you're missing the point. Because none of those is your real problem.
The problem we're solving — before it exists
Most brands doing ₹15–20L/month are unprofitable. Not because their ads are bad. Not because their retention is broken. Not because their CRO needs fixing.
Because they never understood — clearly, precisely — who they are, who they're for, and why that person should pay full price to buy from them.
So they discount to acquire.
They spend to retain.
They optimise creatives to compensate for a positioning problem that creatives can never solve.
The revenue per user stays low.
The business stays fragile.
Scaling makes it worse.
That problem gets built in at zero-to-one. It compounds silently until the money runs out.
Our job, right now, is to make sure that never happens to you.
We do that through an insane amount of work on brand strategy, brand identity, and brand positioning — and then we accelerate and distribute it using every performance and growth lever available. Meta, Google, email, SEO, CRO. All of it. Built on a foundation that knows exactly what it's saying and why someone should believe it.
You will never have a revenue per user problem if you never have an identity problem.
That's what we're here to fix. Before it needs fixing.
What the work actually looks like
First, we build the foundation. Then we scale it. Aggressively.
Here's what sits at the core:
How your brand is positioned
How your product is perceived
How your pricing works
How your story is told
How your website converts
Why customers buy — and how fast, and how often
Why they don't come back
This is not performance marketing in isolation. Not CRO in isolation. Not creative strategy in isolation.
But we do all of it. You will have a performance marketing team running Meta and Google. A data analyst. A conversion rate specialist. Creatives being made and tested every week.
The difference is that every single one of them is operating from the layer of brand and identity. Not despite it. Because of it.
At zero-to-one, brand is the primary lever. Everything else plugs into it.
Why we're careful here
We take very few zero-to-one brands. This is deliberate.
We look for three things before we say yes:
Founder fit. At this stage, the brand is the founder. We need to understand how you think and why you're the person to build this.
Category fit. We specialise in new category creation — spaces where the positioning question isn't "how do we differentiate" but "how do we define." We combine the traditional growth playbook with a brand growth playbook built specifically for your business.
Creative ownership. The foundational work — positioning, narrative, brand identity — is either built entirely by us, or it's already at an unusually high standard. We don't patch other people's foundations.
What we won't do
We won't run ads into an unvalidated product. We won't make weak positioning look strong with good design. If the product or the thinking isn't there yet, we'll tell you — and tell you what needs to happen first.
Post PMF · 1 → 10
There's a high probability we're not the right fit for each other.
So before you proceed, read this note from our founder, Ritesh.
A note from Ritesh
Dear founder,
Either this is exactly what your business needs, or it isn't.
Either way, we save each other time.
— Ritesh, Founder
Most of the brands we've been able to meaningfully help fall into one of four situations. You'll likely recognise yourself in one of these.
1
You were growing well — and then growth slowed down.
Revenue is stable, sometimes even strong. But you've hit a ceiling. Scaling further feels harder than it should.
Ask yourself
Are you solving something people deeply care about — or just competing for the same demand as everyone else?
If you increased your prices by 10–20%, would your customers still choose you?
2
You're spending consistently on ads, but the business doesn't feel healthy.
Traffic is coming in. Revenue looks fine. But profitability is inconsistent, and scaling feels fragile.
Ask yourself
As you scale, is your dependence on paid marketing reducing or increasing?
Are your AOV and repeat purchase rates strong enough to make acquisition and retention work together — not against each other?
3
You're in the early stages, still figuring out what works.
You're doing ₹2–10L/month. Trying different things. Seeing some traction. But nothing feels predictable yet.
Ask yourself
Do you understand why your customers are buying — beyond discounts or ads?
Are you using creatives to generate insights about your customers — or just to chase ROAS?
4
You're pre-revenue — and want to get this right from day one.
You haven't scaled yet, but you don't want to build something fragile.
Ask yourself
Are you building this full-time with serious intent — or treating it as a side project?
Are you willing to invest in strategy before pouring money into execution?
If even one of these feels like a strong "yes", keep reading.
At this point, you already have a sense of where things are breaking. And you may have heard this about us:
"That they help brands grow without increasing ad spend."
That's true. But it's also one of the most misunderstood parts of what we do.
If you're here, you probably expect us to:
Reduce your ad spend
Improve your creatives
Bring in organic traffic
Fix performance marketing
We do all of that. But if that's why you're here, you're missing the point. Because none of those is your real problem.
You don't have a traffic problem.
You don't have a creative problem.
You don't have a channel problem.
You have a revenue per user problem.
Let's simplify this.
100,000 people enter your ecosystem in a year.
You make ₹5 per user → ₹5,00,000.
Same 100,000 people.
Now you make ₹10 per user → ₹10,00,000.
Same number of users. Completely different business.
Most founders try to scale before they deserve to scale.
They push more traffic into a system that isn't built to convert, retain, or monetise properly — and then blame Meta, creatives, or their agency.
We don't force growth. We remove the reasons it isn't happening.
Because if growth feels hard (despite good ops), something fundamental is broken.
What we do sits at the core of your business
How your brand is positioned
How your product is perceived
How your pricing works
How your story is told
How your website converts
How your customers think
Why they buy
How fast they buy
How frequently they buy
Why they don't come back
This is not performance marketing.
This is not CRO.
This is not creative strategy.
This is what decides whether you scale — or don't.
And the order matters.
First, we increase your revenue per user. Then — and only then — we scale. Aggressively.
Because scaling a broken system only makes you lose money faster.
This is not for everyone
If you're getting a few thousand visitors a month, this won't work.
If you're looking for cheap execution, this won't work.
If you want someone to "handle ads", "do SEO", or "improve creatives", this won't work.
If you're looking for quick wins, this won't work.
Here's the simplest way to think about it: if you have 15,000 people coming to your website every month, even a small increase in revenue per user pays for this work. And this is not a one-time gain. It compounds across every user, every month, for years.
But this only works because of how deep we go.
We speak to your customers.
We study behaviour.
We break down your category.
We analyse positioning.
We rebuild your narrative.
This is not execution. This is changing the inputs that drive your growth.
So if you're looking for:
Better ads
More traffic
Opening new channels for growth
Faster growth
Retention, performance marketing, CRO
We do all of this. But none of it works without fixing/building what sits underneath. And that's what Porcellia's true value prop is.
If this isn't for you
If you're merely looking for execution on platforms like Meta, Google, Reddit, or SEO, this likely won't be the right direction.
I understand — proceed to view available slots ↓
Book a call with a 0→1 specialist. Check your email for a confirmation & next steps immediately after.