How Can D2C Founders Scale Business Without Losing Control?

When a D2C brand is small, it is relatively easy to know what is working for it. A founder can see which products are selling, which customers are returning and where the money is being spent. But as the business grows, that visibility can start to fade.

This leaves D2C founders with a deceptively simple question: as the business gets bigger, how do you know what is actually working?

The question becomes harder to answer as brands expand across marketplaces, quick commerce, offline retail and their own channels. Each route to market brings a different set of customers, costs and operating challenges, making it increasingly important for founders to understand what is driving growth, and what is quietly eating into it.

Against this backdrop, Inc42, in collaboration with PhonePe Payment Gateway, hosted a closed-door roundtable during the D2C & Retail Summit 2026 on D2C Brands’ Roadmap To Scaling Without Losing Control. 

The discussion brought together founders and senior leaders from across India’s consumer ecosystem to examine the changes that occur as D2C businesses scale.

Moderated by Puneet Gupta, partner, deals – transaction services, PwC India, the discussion explored how brands can identify what is driving growth, where margins are being lost through inventory, dead stock and returns, and how founders can maintain visibility as business operations become more complex.

Here is the lineup of speakers who participated in the discussion:

• Akash Agarwal, VP & head of international business, Noise
• Alok Paul, COO, Littlebox
• Anuj Nevatia, cofounder, Bacca Bucci
• Harshit Vij, founder & CEO, FREECULTR
• Prateek Bhagchandka, founder & CEO, M.O.M Meal of the Moment
• Prateek Kedia, founder, Wise Life
• Shreyansh Jain, founder, Nutrabay
• Syed Shamoail Haque, founder, Barosi

When Growth Starts Hiding Inventory And Margin Leakages

As D2C brands grow, a growing top line can make it harder to see where the business is actually losing money. A product may sell well overall, but certain sizes could remain unsold, and returns quietly erode margins. 

Looking only at sales as a metric can therefore give founders an incomplete picture of how healthy the business really is.

According to Anuj Nevatia of Bacca Bucci, a product can look healthy overall even when some SKUs become dead stock. With more than 3,500 SKUs, Bacca Bucci tracks contribution margins and inventory at the SKU level and monitors ageing, with stock held beyond 90 days requiring attention.

Littlebox’s Alok Paul looks at inventory differently. The brand maintains finished goods inventory of 17-20 days and forecasts 15 days ahead. When inventory rises and products stop moving, the brand has to use discounts to clear the stock.

Akash Agarwal of Noise highlights another challenge: returns. With relatively lower gross margins in electronics, returns can have a disproportionate impact on profitability. Therefore, Noise tracks where customers drop off across the purchase journey and looks closely at returns and other leakages.

Taken together, these examples point to the same problem: sales alone cannot tell a founder whether growth is working. The answer often lies deeper in the business, at the SKU, inventory, return, and contribution-margin levels.

But product-level economics is only one part of the equation. As brands expand across channels, they also need to understand whether each channel can deliver sustainable growth.

Channel Expansion Can Put Pressure On Profitability

As D2C brands expand beyond their own websites, maintaining profitability becomes more complicated. Each channel comes with its own pricing, discounting, customer behaviour and unit economics. A product that works well on D2C may not necessarily be profitable on a marketplace or quick commerce platform.

Jain of Nutrabay noted that brands need to evaluate “category-channel fit” rather than assuming that product-market fit on D2C will translate across channels. 

As brands add marketplaces, quick commerce, modern trade and offline stores, channel teams may also push for different product mixes, making it important to align channel requirements with the broader brand strategy.

Barosi’s Syed Shamoail Haque approaches this equation from the customer’s side. Barosi uses trial subscriptions to reduce the friction of getting customers to try its products and tracks two points in the customer lifecycle, 30 and 90 days, to understand feedback and retention. Haque said the data showed that customers who stayed for 90 days were likely to remain with the brand for much longer.

Together, these factors make channel selection as much a profitability decision as a growth decision. Instead of expanding everywhere at once, brands need to assess whether each channel can support the right assortment and pricing. 

They also need to consider how much it costs to acquire and retain customers before committing significant marketing capital. This is particularly important as even channels that already work for a brand become increasingly expensive to scale. Managing that complexity then becomes a challenge in its own right.

Building Systems That Keep Growth In Check

As D2C businesses expand, the founder’s role inevitably changes. In the early stages, it is possible to stay close to everything from pricing and inventory to dispatch and customer experience. But as teams, products, and channels multiply, maintaining the same level of direct oversight becomes difficult.

Harshit Vij of FREECULTR sees this as a natural part of scaling. 

“Maybe when you start, the founder has visibility on everything. As you scale, you build systems, you build control measures, and you hire high-calibre people,” he said.

Therefore, the shift is not about keeping every decision with the founder. It is about building enough structure so the founder knows what is happening, even when decisions are distributed across teams and functions.

Jain emphasises keeping processes in step with growth. “At Nutrabay, this includes building a product-classification framework that groups SKUs based on factors such as revenue, gross margin and potential, with decisions then made according to where each product sits within the framework.”

The need for stronger systems becomes even more apparent when brands enter new channels. Bhagchandka of M.O.M Meal of the Moment described how operating across airlines, railways, general trade, modern trade, ecommerce and quick commerce requires businesses to adapt to very different operating environments. 

What works in one channel cannot simply be replicated in another, making execution capabilities increasingly important as the business expands.

Ultimately, losing control at scale does not mean a founder has stopped knowing every detail. It can also mean that the systems that once gave founders visibility are no longer enough as the business becomes more complex.

For brands, the goal is not necessarily more oversight, but enough systems, people and processes to make the right information available when it matters.

The roundtable, organised by Inc42 in collaboration with PhonePe Payment Gateway, came back to a key question for D2C founders: how do you know what is actually working as the business grows? The answer is to have clear visibility into your products, channels, customers and operations.

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