How Mamaearth & Phool stand out in India’s D2C boom: CPR Global's Chaitalli Roy breaks it down

India is now the world’s third-largest D2C ecosystem — hundreds of brands, hundreds of millions of shoppers, a market set to triple in value over the next five years. And yet, if you lined up the positioning statements of a hundred Indian D2C brands side by side, you would find the same four words repeated with minor variation: good quality, affordable price.

That is not a differentiator. That is the default. The crisis in India’s D2C space is not a product crisis — the products are often genuinely good. It is a brand narrative crisis. 

Most brands have no clear articulation of what they stand for, why they exist beyond filling a market gap, and what ethos drives their decisions. Without that, no amount of performance marketing or influencer seeding builds a brand. It builds a catalogue.

When ‘good product’ is no longer enough to stand on

The brands that have broken through built something beyond the product. Mamaearth planted a flag around ‘toxin-free’ at the exact moment young Indian parents were rethinking what they put on their children’s skin. The Whole Truth Foods built its entire identity around radical ingredient transparency — putting everything on the label and daring consumers to compare. The product was the proof. The narrative was the reason to choose.

Consider Phool — agarbattis made from flowers collected at temples, given a second life rather than letting them pollute rivers. In one of India’s most commoditised, unorganised categories, Phool built a premium brand that people seek out, gift, and talk about. The story carried through every touchpoint: the packaging, the communication, the founder’s voice. 

The product became aspirational not because it was technically superior, but because it stood for something. Phool could price at a premium in a market where price had always been the only variable.

Now look at the crowded middle. Hundreds of jewellery brands in the D2C space with no visible differentiator beyond a ten percent discount, free shipping, and a festival offer every other week. Dozens of skincare brands with clean formulations, minimalist packaging, and identical founder stories. Well-made products with no ethos, no story, no reason to choose one over the other once the discount expires. These brands are competing on margin — a race with no sustainable finish line. They acquired customers. They did not build believers.

AI amplifies what exists. If what exists is thin, AI makes it thinner — faster.

When Adidas released a sneaker campaign created almost entirely with AI-generated visuals, it was stunning — and unmistakably Adidas. The movement, the energy, the feeling of sport as self-expression the brand has spent decades earning the right to own. It worked not because the technology was impressive, but because there was a story underneath it already decades deep. The AI was the brush. The brand was the canvas.

Now consider the hundred other AI-generated brand videos that dropped the same month. Polished. Technically proficient. Completely forgettable. No point of view. No earned identity. No reason to care. The technology was identical. The outcome was not. 

AI is an accelerant, not an architect — it scales what already has meaning. If your narrative is ‘good quality at affordable prices,’ AI will produce more of that, faster, across more channels. More volume. Less signal. That is not an advantage. It is an acceleration of the wrong thing.

The fundamentals have not changed. Only the excuses have.

Invest in building your brand narrative — properly, deliberately, early. Not a tagline or a colour palette. A genuine articulation of why this brand exists, what it believes, and what it would never compromise on. Nykaa built its identity around aspiration and discovery — the idea that beauty in India deserved to be taken seriously — while every competitor was positioning around price or range. That narrative informed everything: editorial content, brand partnerships, in-store experience. It was not accidental. It was built.

Define your ethos clearly — what you stand for and what you do not. Raw Pressery built its identity around one conviction: that what you put into your body matters, and convenience should not come at the cost of integrity. Every product, every channel, every communication reflected that stance. The consumers who cared about that found them and stayed.

Drive it consistently — and this is where most founders lose the plot, distracted by new platforms, new formats, new algorithms. The fundamentals of brand building have not changed. What has changed is the number of channels demanding your attention.

Nirma did not just have a price point — it had a family, a jingle, a feeling present in every single execution until it became part of how a generation thought about value. Vicco Vajradanti sold a belief system about what was natural and good, and said so on every platform available for decades. They had Doordarshan and prints. D2C founders today have Instagram, YouTube Shorts, quick commerce, WhatsApp, and creator networks. More surface area. The same discipline: be consistent enough that people know exactly what you stand for before they have ever bought from you.

India’s D2C market will keep growing regardless. The question is which brands will still be standing — and standing for something — when the easy growth runs out. The ones that will are the ones that stopped competing on product features alone and started building the one thing that cannot be copied: a brand with a clear identity, a consistent voice, and a story that people actually want to be part of.

Chaitalli Roy, founder, CPR Global