Hosted on 3rd & 4th December, the 2nd edition of The D2C Summit by Inc42 Plus saw the participation of 5,000+ attendees
Spread across 3 stages and 25+ sessions, the conference brought together more than 75+ founders, investors and enablers as speakers
We would like to take this moment and thank all our partners and sponsors who supported us in enabling hundreds of D2C brands in their journey
Last week we concluded India’s largest D2C and ecommerce conference — the 2nd edition of The D2C Summit. The D2C segment has seen tremendous growth this year, marked by the shifting consumer behaviour and rising affinity for the digital sales channel. And brands, both new and established alike, have taken up this opportunity to bring out innovative strategies around product differentiation, brand building and customer engagement.
There is a huge opportunity in the segment to tap into, with more than 15 Mn active online sellers and 50,000+ digital-first brands across categories targeting a $100 Bn+ addressable market by 2025. We decoded this opportunity through The D2C Summit, imparted actionable insights, and presented a platform that brings together industry veterans and experts for holistic knowledge sharing.
The response to The D2C Summit was overwhelming, with nearly 5,000+ attendees encapsulating 67,000+ session views across two days. The attendees engaged, asked questions and interacted with speakers and the community. Even with sessions running in three parallel stages for two-days straight, their enthusiasm remained constant.
And none of this would have been possible without our partners and the enablers of this rising sector, who not only helped us execute this conference but also enabled us in making it a grand success.
We would like to take this moment to thank all our partners!
Presenting Partner
Trell
Founded in 2016 by Arun Lodhi, Bimal Kartheek Rebba, Prashant Sachan and Pulkit Agrawal, Trell is a social commerce platform. It allows users to gain insightful information, recommendations and reviews around various product categories from relatable peers through meaningful content. The users can also make a purchase directly from the app. With a vision to empower users in making better lifestyle choices, Trell has more than 100 Mn users.
In addition to supporting us in bringing the summit to completion, its cofounder Rebba and Agrawal also hosted sessions. Rebba hosted a panel discussion and a masterclass — Scaling Your D2C Brand From 1 To 100 and How D2C Brands Can 10X Growth With Social Commerce — respectively. On the other hand, Agrawal was part of a panel discussion — How D2C Brands Can Scale Up With Social Commerce Platforms.
“It is essential to establish a unified trade network that can also be leveraged to foster beneficial information exchange between all the players in the ecosystem. These kinds of events serve as a one-stop destination for established businesses and new entrants to learn about industry trends, challenges and solutions,” says Rebba.
Co-Presenting Partners
Karix
Karix is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tanla Platforms Limited, which offers a suite of customer engagement solutions to support the communication needs of enterprises across sectors. The company offers engagement tools ranging from marketing automation, actionable messaging to chatbots, live agent chat and more across channels, including WhatsApp, SMS, email, and voice.
Karix serves more than 2,000 enterprise customers across BFSI, ecommerce, retail, government, manufacturing, internet & social media sectors and empowers businesses to provide a customer experience focussed digital experience.
To help the attendees understand the importance of effective customer engagement, Sonia Kaul, VP, Product and Marketing and Digital Enablement at Karix, hosted a masterclass on scaling a D2C brand with the right digital customer experience.
Additionally, Sriram Vinjamuri, chief growth officer, Tanla and group companies (parent company of Karix) moderated a panel discussion on Building Effective Retention & Acquisition Strategies. The panel included Purplle’s cofounder and CEO Manish Taneja, Harini Sivakumar, founder, Earth Rhythm, Bombay Shaving Club’s COO Deepak Gupta, Hash founder Shwetank Jain and Toothsi’s cofounder and CEO Arpi Mehta.
During the discussion, the speakers covered areas such as how D2C brands should select the right channels at the right stage of the journey for a specific target audience and the key KPIs to look at for the various channels for acquisition & retention.
“Such forums and discussions act as catalysts, bringing out the nuances and strategies of the various players across sectors which aid not just cross-learning and sharing of insights but also coming together as a community of forward-thinking businesses,” says Vinjamuri.
Pay10
Delhi-based digital financial services startup Pay10 was founded in 2017 by Sakshi Chawla. As a payment aggregator, the platform offers various enterprise to enterprise (E2E) payment solutions including white label solutions, e-payment wallets, ecommerce services, online remittance and merchant accounts.
The fintech startup also aims to meet the financial needs of people living in both tier 1 and tier 2, 3 cities. To solve this problem, it offers its consumer-oriented product to enable cashless payments for bills, taxes, retail as well as P2P and P2B money transfers.
Aiming to help the attendees understand how focussing on payments gateway can improve customer experience, Pay10 director Jaideep Pawar participated in a panel discussion on the modern D2C product stack where panellists covered themes such as how D2C brands can go about evaluating products (payments, storefront, logistics) – the cost-benefit model, and the role these products play in D2C brands’ scale-up journeys.
“The 2nd edition of D2C Summit was an amazing experience. From bringing together an esteemed speaker line-up to planning the sessions has been commendable work by the Inc42 team. The event has been a great success and we look forward to similar events to come. Kudos to team Inc42,” says Pawar.
Powered-By Partners
Dukaan
Launched in June 2020 by Suumit Shah and Subhash Choudhary, Dukaan is a no-code platform that enables merchants to launch their ecommerce website in a few minutes and scale it on the internet. The platform allows online sellers to use a custom domain, integrate with payment gateways, build a mobile application for storefronts and leverage various customisation tools to create a unique experience for their customers.
The company CTO and cofounder Subhash Choudhary participated in a panel discussion sharing his insights on how third-party platform solutions can add agility and efficiency to a D2C brand.
Salesforce
Headquartered in San Francisco, Salesforce is a cloud-based SaaS company focussed on customer relationship management (CRM) technology. Founded in 1999, the company enables businesses across industries to leverage its products based on cloud, mobile, social, IoT and AI technologies to effectively connect and engage customers.
Sanket Atal, senior VP & MD, Sites, Salesforce India, participated in a panel discussion decoding the D2C opportunity in India and how data analytics and cloud technology can help brands scale up.
Shiprocket
Founded in 2017 by Gautam Kapoor, Saahil Goel and Vishesh Khurana, the third-party logistics startup Shiprocket enables global and domestic shipping for marketplace sellers and D2C businesses. Helping ecommerce sellers ship their products and manage logistics, Shiprocket claims to have a monthly active merchant base of 60K and 10K D2C brands.
Goel moderated a fireside chat in The D2C Summit, where he hosted Priyanka Gill, cofounder, Good Glamm Group and discussed in-depth how a D2C brand can build an effective content-to-commerce strategy.
While Khurana participated in a discussion covering how D2C brands should select the right logistics partners and how the logistics industry is enabling India’s D2C brands unlock the $100 Bn industry.
Associate Partner
MongoDB
Headquartered in New York, MongoDB is a global general-purpose database platform that offers businesses secure and scalable cloud storage spaces. The company, at present, has more than 29K customers in 100+ countries. The company claims that its database platform has been downloaded more than 200 Mn times.
Helping the attendees understand how modern data platforms can help D2C brands remove the logistical barriers for innovations, MongoDB’s regional VP, APAC (Corporate) Suvig Sharma, hosted a masterclass at the summit.
