Indian fashion brands today have more routes to consumers than ever before, from D2C websites and marketplaces to quick commerce, physical retail, wholesale and social commerce. But the real question isn’t how many channels a brand can enter anymore, it’s which ones are actually adding growth. As one expert puts it, the question shouldn’t be “Where else can we sell?” It should be “What does this channel add that we don’t already have?”
One of the first questions is whether the channel actually expands customer reach. “Is the channel actually taking you to a consumer you are not already reaching, or is it just another door into the same room?” asked Ashmeer M. Sayyed, consultant and former Chief Retail Officer, DaMENSCH. He suggests a blunt way to test this: “If you shut this channel down tomorrow, would that revenue disappear entirely, or would 80% of it simply reappear in another channel within a quarter? If it is the latter, you have not added a channel, you have added a cost centre with a discount attached.”
That number is worth tracking over a proper stretch of time rather than a launch month, since launch months are always flattered by curiosity and promotional spend. A channel can look also attractive on paper, with a large audience, rapid growth and strong competitor presence, and still fail to deliver for a specific brand. As Chetan Siyal, CMO of menswear label SNITCH, points out, brand-channel fit matters as much as scale. “A premium brand sitting on a discount-heavy marketplace listing, competing purely on price, is doing damage to itself that no sales number in that channel will show you.”
The bigger trap, he adds, is mistaking reach for relevance. “One learning for us has been not to confuse access to a large audience with access to the right customer. A channel can have millions of users, but if the customer intent, price expectations or economics don’t align with the brand, scale alone isn’t a good enough reason to be there.”
Another factor founders often underestimate is operational readiness. “Whether the brand actually has the team, the inventory discipline and the fulfilment capability that this channel demands is important to establish; otherwise an already thin operation gets stretched to be even thinner,” said Sayyed.
But even if a channel brings the right customer, it still needs to make financial sense. The next question, therefore, is economics, and that means looking beyond topline revenue. Before entering any channel, brands need to look closely at contribution margin after every channel-specific cost, commission, logistics, returns processing, any mandatory advertising spend the platform extracts, and the working capital locked into that channel’s inventory cycle. Return rate deserves equally close attention, since a channel with an attractive headline margin and a punishing return rate can quietly eat away at that margin by the time a product comes back, gets reprocessed, and ends up fit only for a markdown. Customer acquisition cost matters just as much when weighed against lifetime value, since a channel that’s cheap to enter but expensive to acquire a loyal customer through isn’t actually a bargain, no matter how the topline revenue reads.
That’s how Udaipur-based BEYOUNG evaluates its channels. “BEYOUNG therefore looks beyond topline sales and considers metrics such as gross margin, net realisation, channel commissions, discount levels, return and RTO rates, logistics costs, customer acquisition cost, contribution margin, average order value, repeat purchase behaviour and inventory efficiency,” said Co-Founder Shivam Soni.
That said, not every channel needs identical economics from day one. “Sometimes a channel has a strategic role, whether that is acquiring new customers, entering a new geography or increasing brand discovery. But you should be very clear about why you are accepting those economics and what you expect the channel to eventually deliver,” said Siyal.
Give Every Channel a Different Job
Once a brand decides a channel is worth entering, the next challenge is treating it differently from every other channel it already sells on. “Each channel has a different consumer intent and a different browsing behaviour, and product assortment should respond to that,” said Sayyed. A D2C site can carry the full range, including the newest and most premium launches, because that consumer has come specifically to discover the brand. A marketplace shopper, by contrast, is usually comparing several brands within the same search result, so the best-selling, more price-competitive lines tend to perform there, while niche or premium pieces can sit unsold, eating into inventory turns without adding much in return.
Wholesale and general trade need depth in proven, high-velocity styles rather than experimental ones, since those channels depend on sell-through at volume, not storytelling. Physical retail calls for a more focused approach, with stores carrying a sharper selection rather than a thin slice of the entire catalogue. As Sayyed puts it, “A new store is a laboratory, not a museum of your full catalogue.”
SNITCH follows a similar philosophy. “Someone walking into a SNITCH store may want to explore, try multiple fits and discover something new. Someone on a marketplace may arrive with a much more specific search. Someone on our own app may already know the brand and be looking for what’s new,” said Siyal. “I don’t believe in blindly replicating 100% of the assortment everywhere. For example, new stores should open with the top 30 to 40% of the range by revenue contribution, stocked in depth. Importantly, the brand should remain consistent, but merchandising should respond to how people actually shop on that channel. Otherwise, you are optimising for operational simplicity rather than the customer.”
Quick commerce takes this idea even further. Rather than treating it as another place to list the full catalogue, brands are testing which products naturally fit an immediacy-led purchase occasion. For accessories brand Hexafun, that use case has turned out to be quite specific. “Two categories consistently perform the best for us: caps and socks. Socks and caps are classic last-minute purchases. Additionally, customers often opt for value packs to meet minimum order thresholds or free delivery requirements, which increases average order value while maintaining strong conversion rates,” said Manali Sanghvi, Co-founder, Hexafun. Experts reiterated that the assortment has to make sense for how customers actually shop on each one.
