You open a shopping app to buy one kurta. Hours of scrolling later, your cart has a handful of brands in it, and you have not visited a single brand’s own website. That small shopping habit reflects a much bigger challenge for India’s direct-to-consumer (D*C) apparel brands.
While online shopping gives them access to consumers across the country, most apparel purchases still happen offline, and much of the online market is controlled by marketplaces rather than individual brands.
A consumer study by the Clothing Manufacturers Association of India (CMAI) and research firm *Lattice showed that online is a small slice of India’s apparel sales, and most of it goes to marketplaces. Brand-owned websites share just a fifth of that online pie.
