Ankit Agarwal

I have done both so m compelled to write a detailed answer to this, plus it’s a Sunday. This might get too detailed, so sorry for that too. Which is harder? Well, it depends. If you are interested to sell online and love the game, you can actually start doing it in one day. Take Shopify, put your products, start running ads. I get it that running ads is the hardest, cos there is no actual course that teaches you how to do this. People who actually know it, know that it’s actually very simple. I myself got trained by people on twitter spaces. I have sent flowers to women, begged people, done everything possible to learn it. This is just one person job. For me, d2c is easier cos I don’t have to depend on other people to run ads. Manufacturing is different. You need to work with labour, and they can be difficult to work with if you are not from that background. I wasn’t. Both me and Sameer learned everything practically, step by step. We had two strikes in the first six months. It was hilarious cos we only had 5 tailors. They said if you don’t give our contractor extra advance 50k rupees, we won’t work. We didn’t know if we gave him money, will he turn up tmrw. Second strike happened cos they knew we were under pressure and the finishing contractor tripled his price, two days before date of delivery. Both me and Sameer have ironed and packed clothes, multiple times. If you have already established scale on d2c, you can look at manufacturing but if you don’t have that background o won’t suggest it, cos it’s not worth it fighting with workers and handling them day in and day out. It will absolutely drain you. Sameer handles this now and he has managers to help him do it. Go from d2c to manufacturing, if you can hire enough staff and contractors to not deal with workers, yourself or have a team member who only handles manufacturing. Some points on manufacturing to d2c, manufacturers lose be use they always try to sell cheap. No money spent on photo shoots, no willingness to spend on marketing. They feel they can make at 299 and thus win the market by selling at 349, cos market leader is selling at 499. They never win. You need to understand marketing, branding, communication, operations etc etc. Ideally manufacturers and marketing people should work together to start up, than trying to handle both things.