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D2C Pulse is a newsletter written by the team at GlobalBees, curating happenings in the direct-to-consumer ecosystem of India.

This week had to rush back home from a business trip due to pet issues. The pet care industry in India is experiencing a remarkable surge in growth, driven by an increase in pet adoption rates and a growing demand for high-quality pet products and services.

The online market for pet care products and services is also expanding rapidly in India and is expected to have grown by almost 58% in 2022. The pet care market has the potential to grow to $5 Bn by 2030. Increasing rates of pet adoption, calorific value conversion, and humanisation - are some of the key trends driving the pet care market growth in India.

🗞️Marketplace Updates

• Shopify’s Side Quest: Shopify wants to “focus more” on AI and has shelved its logistics business. The company has sold its logistics business to Flexport for 13% equity. It’s now termed its logistics foray wherein it spent $2 Billion for logistics startup Deliverr as a “side quest”.  For context, Flexport is a 10-year-old freight and logistics platform that has raised more than $2 billion in funding.

  • Meanwhile, the company reported better-than-expected Q1 revenue of $1.51B, then announced a 20% workforce reduction

• Food and grocery delivery platform Swiggy has closed down Handpicked, its premium grocery delivery service, just six months after rolling out a pilot for users in Bengaluru. Handpicked was introduced in December last year to provide gourmet local food products such as Kombucha, ready-to-cook meats, spreads, and region-specific food.

  Last month, it rebranded its morning grocery delivery service, Supr Daily, to InsanelyGood, with a focus on locally sourced and organic food items.

• Myntra has launched FWD, an immersive fashion experience for Gen-Z, on its platform, and expects to add 10 million new customers over the next two years. The company claims that its app has more than 8 million Gen-Z shopper. In its initial days, FWD will offer over 65,000 style options, from over 500 brands like H&M, and will scale that to more than 1 lakh by the end of the year. Myntra FWD will be visible in the bottom navigation and will have features like simplified trend-spotting-to-shopping, photo search, and daily drops among other features.

• Not a week goes by when ONDC is not in the news. The government-backed Open Network for Digital Commerce, or ONDC, has breached the 10,000 daily order mark, helped by early discounts and the discovery of a cheaper food delivery system. Multiple tweets have surfaced where users are sharing screengrabs of food delivery bills on ONDC vs Zomato and other food delivery apps. Looks like the ONDC folks are on to something.

• Snap is arming retail brands with new shopping capabilities—powered by augmented reality and AI—for both online and brick-and-mortar experiences.

  The company recently announced Snap AR Mirrors for virtual try-ons in store. Snap has enlisted Nike and Men’s Wearhouse to test out the Mirror in select stores, and Popelka said Nike will be testing out footwear-specific Mirrors later this year to allow shoppers to “try on” custom designs.
  

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🍕D2C Bites

• Direct-to-consumer milk delivery startup Uzhavarbumi has secured an investment of Rs 7 crore. Founded by Vetrivel Palani,  Uzhavarbumi promotes direct commerce between farmers and consumers as the company delivers farm-fresh milk to urban areas of Chennai, procuring milk from rural and marginal farmers at a better market price and forming a bridge between the primary producers (farmers) and consumers. The startup claims that it procures from more than 2,200 farmers and operates 42 hubs across Chennai, delivering dairy products to over 15,000 customers. It claims that it is doing over 15 lakhs home deliveries per year catering to the growing demand for farm-fresh milk.

• Retail tech startup Ace Turtle has raised $34 million in its Series B funding. Started as an e-commerce solution provider, decade-old Ace Turtle enables retail brands to sell online  It has two business verticals – SaaS and licensed brands. The company is the exclusive licensee of global retail brands such as Lee,Wrangler, Toys“R”Us, and Babies“R”Us for India and other South Asian markets. The firm recently said that it will open 50 stores of casual wear brand Lee in the next 12 months as it enters new markets.

• Creator tech startup Hypd raises $4 Mn in pre-Series A. Hypd’s tech platform enables creators to build their own multi-brand digital storefronts, inspired by their content, via which they can curate products and services and enable a native checkout for their followers on social media. Founded by Ashwarya Garg and Akshay Bhatnagar, the company aims to empower 100,000 creators by 2025, both English-Hindi and regional.

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🖊️Poll Call

Reads and Recommendations 📚

• Martech: What worked, and what didn’t for marketers?

• Companies ranked by number of employees

• Check out these Youtube SEO tactics

• How air-fryer influencers helped the appliance heat up

• How Walmart builds artificial intelligence tools

• The rise of the influencer whistleblower. A Bournvita tale

That’s all for this week! Bye!

Stay tuned for more.

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