Rushabh Pipada

Everlane AllBirds Honest Company Casper Blue Apron Glossier Away Gen 1 DTC was not wrong about brand or customer love. It was wrong about venture-scale outcomes.

Another interesting thing is that Everlane was everything not-SHEIN.

Everlane raised around $90M, peak valuation around $550M, and is now selling for $100M. Wild outcome for one of Gen 1 DTC’s most iconic brands. Clothing is brutal. Venture money makes the bar even more unforgiving. I still remember the SoHo store launch - Lines outside the store, real customer love, peak Gen 1 DTC energy.

The buyer is not really paying for the number of templaytes. They’re paying for the time saved or revenue created. Then you price accordingly.It's not a simple low, mid, or high-ticket product. It's based on what you are promising them: Is it time saved? Is it money saved? Is it revenue created?

@RushabhPipada What price you consider low ticket and mid ticket for a simple digital product ...? Take eg - a pack of fresh 1000 static ad templates for cold audience ( asking for Indian market )

Middle tier pricing is the slowest way to kill your D2C brand. Top tier = branding game. Bottom tier = volume game. Middle tier = hope game. And hope doesn’t pay salaries. Ran an apparel brand at Rs.6,500 AOV. Every single day felt like a battle. Every few days, a small spike, a little hope, and then back to zero. 100 other brands sitting at the same price, doing the same thing, telling themselves the same story. If you’re priced in the middle, you’re already dead. You just haven’t checked the body yet. Go premium or go cheap. The middle is a graveyard.

@adityasingh_58 We did try moving unit mix. Bundles and PDP quantity breaks help AOV, but they don’t fully solve the core middle problem: the buyer needs more proof, more trust, and a sharper reason to choose you now. We were not selling 0 units.The issue was scalability.

@RushabhPipada middle's a graveyard for AOV too, not just brand pull. across the apparel stores we watch, the ones that climb out usually stack the basket with PDP quantity breaks before touching the price tag. did you try moving unit mix or was the middle dead from day one?

@pranavnahal Yes AI made it better - but 6500 was my SKU not AI’s. Discussed above was my problem, not AI’s. But essentially if 6500 AOV is luxury, then where do we put Boss, Emporio Armani, Alo, Lululemon, etc?

@RushabhPipada AI that wrote this quote thinks 65$ is middle tier

@ArmaanYadav5322 Luxury clothing is priced far above 6.5K and affordable is far below 6.5K

@ArmaanYadav5322 Yes.

@ishivammalhotra Its comparative. Luxury clothing is priced far above, and affordable is far below.

@ishivammalhotra Yes.

Flip both halves of this: Retail is more gatekept than Meta. Shelf space, listing fees, category managers, all closed. Meta/Google is more open than retail. Anyone with a card can buy attention, US dropshippers build $40M on it. The real retail tax isn't distribution, it's cashflow. Much looser than online.

@RushabhPipada Ideally your share of business coming from open distribution markets (retail) should be more than closed distribution markets (meta, Google) where only 2-3 major players hold the distribution channels.

Have to push back on this one. Every brand, D2C or retail, starts on 1 or 2 channels. That's not a weakness, that's how you find PMF, you go where attention is already concentrated. Meta, Google, large format retail, all necessary evils at that stage. The part that gets ignored: cash flow. Diversifying channels too early eats working capital before the brand can sustain it. Pros and cons on both sides, no clean answer. Agree that single channel forever isn't healthy. Disagree that turning off Meta is the test of whether you're a brand. Depends entirely on stage and unit economics.

@vikramchopra Great initiative. The org chart isn't the constraint, the mental model is.

If you join Cars24 today, you will find no bands, no titles and no grades. We are one team. There is no India, no International, no Lending, no Vehicle Ownership. We now staff backwards from the right person for the problem, not based on “I am a lending person, so I can’t do customer experience.” You will always find people with more experience than you wherever you go but here it's entirely your choice whether you want to leverage their wisdom, challenge their thinking or build a better way forward yourself. We are intentionally creating space for people who show initiative, will and the tenacity to solve meaningful problems. And your real flex becomes the impact you create with the freedom, context and tools you are given. Cars24 is a flatland & everyone is a builder.

If you’re building in a high Catalog Rent category or a low Catalog Rent category, I want to hear how you think about this. What separates a product that deserves more inventory from one that only looks like growth? Tag Indian / Global founders/investors, would love to hear thoughts from the builders & the backers.

If you disagree, I genuinely want to know what you think the issue is. Because I do not think most DTC brands die from lack of ideas. They die from too many unmeasured ideas sitting in inventory. The catalog should compound cash. If it compounds complexity, it is not assortment. It is debt.

I’ve been calling this "Catalog Rent". Every variant in a DTC catalog occupies balance-sheet real estate. A size, color, fit, pack, combo or offer is not just a listing. It consumes inventory cash, creative bandwidth, warehouse space, support time, return risk and markdown risk. It has to pay rent.