In the D2C space, especially fashion, owning your audience is everything. Unlike marketplaces or social media platforms, email lets us directly communicate with consumers without relying on third parties. Promotions, product drops, early access offers, brand stories, and feedback loops all become easier when we have a strong mailing list.
That was our starting point: build a mailing list that we can use to drive repeat sales, lower customer acquisition costs (CAC), and improve return on ad spend (ROAS).
Initially, we planned to piggyback on already-established audiences. The idea was to partner with niche newsletters and podcasters who aligned with our brand and target demographic. By collaborating with these creators, we hoped to direct their traffic to our site, where we could capture email sign-ups and build brand familiarity.
During this research phase, we began identifying creators who spoke directly to audiences interested in lifestyle, fashion, youth culture, and emerging Indian D2C brands. The direction was promising, but a deeper look revealed a critical flaw: we hadn’t built the foundation yet.
We were preparing to run traffic without a destination, no email capture setup, no defined value exchange for subscribers, and no automated email flows to nurture the leads we’d generate.
At that point, we reconsidered. Instead of immediately investing in external collaborations, we explored building an in-house content engine. The thought was to launch our own newsletter, social content, and even a podcast to organically attract our target audience.
But this raised another issue, focus. We’re still in the early 0–1 stage. Our core product (apparel) is still gaining traction, and we didn’t have the bandwidth to execute full-scale content while also building performance marketing systems.
So, we made a decision: before scaling content, we need to validate sales. That led us to performance marketing, specifically Meta (Instagram/Facebook) and Google Ads. We leaned toward Meta, given that our product is visual and storytelling-driven.
Fashion, especially in the form of t-shirts, is a category that benefits heavily from lifestyle visuals, what the product feels like, not just what it looks like. We realized that static product photos weren’t enough. What we needed was engaging, authentic, and social-native content.
To amplify this visual approach, we aimed to build a UGC (User-Generated Content) flywheel. The concept is simple: