Trends #7.1: D2C - The Better India & The Better Home

We have Dhimant Parekh on the show to talk about building an Audience First D2C Brand with The Better Home.  In the episode today, We discuss the journey of building TBI, how they were able to leverage the community to build out their D2C business and what it's like to work with your significant other as a co-founder. Let's jump in.

Links:
The Better India Website
The Better Home Products
Audience First Products Newsletter

For our next edition of Trends, we are covering a new way of building consumer brands: by going Direct to consumer or often referred to as D2C. 

Direct to Consumer is a business model wherein you cut out all the middlemen that exist in the traditional supply chain - your wholesaler & retailer primarily. You leverage the internet and build your presence online to directly sell to the consumer. You save up on the margin that would've to be distributed across the supply chain and can utilize that to build your brand and generate traffic on your website. 

Pure D2C is hard to find in India. Most D2C brands leverage online marketplaces to reach their customers because building traffic for your own website can be extremely challenging. You need to pour in a lot of marketing dollars to make that happen and that often eats up all the margins you saved by going Direct to Consumer and ruins the unit economics. 

Which is where the guest we have today on the podcast has an interesting point of view to share when it comes to building their D2C brand. We have Dhimant Parekh, Co-founder of The Better India and the better home. The better India is a content production house that focuses on positive happy stories. They feature stories on topics such as Agriculture, Education, Health, Environment from across the country. And the concept of Positive Journalism is very fascinatng for me personally because I actively avoid reading newspapers and following current affairs. I feel like most of it so negative that it hurts you more than it helps you. That's where something like TBI has been a go-to source for me to read feel good stories from the across the country. 

Dhimant and Anuradha, co-founders of TBI are also married to each other. TBI started out as a Blog in 2008. In 2011, Anuradha quit her job to focus on this full-time and in 2013, Dhimant followed suit. They have had an interesting journey of building out the content business focused on Positive journalism and are present across different social media channels along with their own website. Cumulatively, they clock-in close 50 million views in a month for the content they produce. 

Now, you must be thinking, how is this a D2C play. Well, enter The Better Home, the D2C arm of TBI. Over the years, TBI has been able to build a community of like-minded individuals. This community cares about the good that's happening in society. The community also believes in sustainability and that's where Dhimant and Anuradha got the idea for The Better Home. 

The Better Home sells Eco-Friendly Home Cleaner subscription service. It has 4 products, Dishwashing liquid, toilet cleaner, laundry cleaner and floor cleaner. I'm not going to kill the suspense of how they came up with this idea, but I do want to share how this D2C line has scaled. So in 4 months of starting post the lockdown, The better home products achieved a monthly revenue of Rs. 1 Crore in 4 months! Now that's some quick scaling up.  A big reason for this was the community that they had built over the years. A classic case study of building an audience first and then subsequently building a product or service to meet the need of the audience, in this case, it was  D2C Home Cleaner product line.