The great D2C reset: How 2025 merged offline and online commerce

Every few years, Indian commerce goes through a moment that quietly redraws its roadmap. In the early 2010s, it was the rise of marketplaces. By the late 2010s, digital-first, D2C brands began gaining momentum. Around 2020–2022, the sector hit its peak, with a surge of D2C launches across categories, all built on a simple promise: rapid scale without the cost or complexity of physical storefronts. This D2C wave didn’t just introduce India to new brands; it fundamentally rewired how consumers discovered, evaluated, and trusted products. Instagram replaced shop windows, performance ads replaced billboards, and checkout pages replaced physical counters. 

However, 2025 became the year that finally broke this binary — when online and offline stopped behaving like competing channels and began operating as one continuous commerce system. The signs were, however, visible as early as 2024, when a handful of brands began cautiously experimenting with physical formats. 

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What changed in 2025 wasn’t consumer intent, but consumer expectations. As digital discovery matured, consumers began demanding more reassurance, experience, and immediacy, elements that pure-play online journeys struggled to deliver at scale. The result was a clear pivot, with several online-first brands planting physical roots. From fashion and beauty to food and home, categories once confident in scaling digitally alone moved decisively offline.

According to Sharukh Lakhani, Ecommerce Lead at Wavemaker, WPP Media India, D2C brands leased close to 6 lakh sq. ft. of retail space in H1 2025, accounting for 18% of total retail leasing, up from just 8% the previous year. Fashion led the charge, followed by home & furnishing, jewellery, and health & personal care.

The shift was visible not just in numbers, but in ambition. Brands like Lenskart, which added over 450 stores in FY25 and has announced plans to open 620 new company-owned stores, covering lease payments, rentals, and related costs by the end of the year, and Nykaa, whose offline footprint has crossed 250 stores across 80+ cities, made it clear that physical presence was no longer a branding experiment, it had become a core growth lever. At the same time, platforms like JioMart rapidly expanded their dark store and quick-commerce footprint to over 1,000 cities. D2C brands across categories like Snitch, The Bear House, Bewakoof, The Souled Store and kidswear brand Kidbea accelerated store rollouts and experiential retail formats, using physical presence to drive discovery, trial, and trust.

As Lakhani noted, online brands are now chasing consumer touchpoints offline, while offline incumbents are racing to own digital discovery. With Indian retail projected to grow from $1 trillion in 2024 to $2 trillion by 2030, the prize is scale, increasingly driven by Gen Z consumers, Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, and shoppers who expect brands to meet them everywhere, seamlessly.

For marketers, this convergence didn’t just alter channel plans, it upended long-held assumptions about performance and brand building.

Manish Sharma, President at Arena India (Havas Media Network), stated, “2025's convergence forced a rethink, blurring the lines between performance-driven digital spends and brand-building offline investments. The unlearning for us was realizing that Performance is now Phygital. When a successful D2C brand opens a flagship store, that store is a measurable performance channel it drives trust, reduces returns, and serves as a high-intent conversion point that digital channels feed into. Our new focus was on Full-Funnel Commerce. We didn't change the size of the budgets as much as we changed the mandate for those budgets.”

Adding to this, Venkat Mallik, Founder & CEO of J7, said that consumer behaviour has long moved fluidly between ROPO (research online, purchase offline) and its reverse. What 2025 did was force brands to finally operationalise that reality. D2C players began investing seriously in experience and trust through physical touchpoints, while legacy offline brands doubled down on first-party data, direct relationships, and digital-led discovery.

Why Brands Finally Took D2C Offline

For most D2C brands, going offline wasn’t part of their original playbook. Physical retail was seen as expensive, operationally complex, and fundamentally at odds with the efficiency promise of digital-first scale. Yet by 2025, that resistance gave way to urgency. What pushed brands offline wasn’t a rejection of digital, it was the realisation that digital alone had limits.

Rising customer acquisition costs, increasing competition on performance platforms, and slowing trust-building through screens made physical presence not just attractive, but necessary. As categories matured, consumers wanted more than sharp creatives and discount-led discovery; they wanted reassurance, experience, and immediacy.

D2C kidswear brand Kidbea, which expanded to 50+ multi-brand outlets this year and launched its first exclusive brand outlet, says 2025 forced a rethink of what effectiveness means. “Earlier, effectiveness meant clicks, ROAS, and short-term attribution. Today, it means repeat customers, in-store conversations, parents touching the fabric, and kids actually wearing the product before buying,” said Swapnil Srivastava, Co-founder and CEO of Kidbea.

For the brand, online and offline now feed each other. Store launches spike online searches, digital storytelling drives footfall, and on-ground influencer moments pull shoppers into stores. Reflecting this convergence, around 40% of Kidbea’s spends go into digital performance and content, 35% into brand building through offline activations and in-store experiences, and 25% into hyperlocal, retail-led marketing tied to city-level visibility.

For Dhruv Kohli, Founder of Boba Bhai, the shift became impossible to ignore in 2025. While online platforms continued to drive reach, he says conversions and loyalty were significantly stronger when customers encountered the brand in-store. “Consumers wanted to taste before they trusted,” Kohli notes, adding that offline touchpoints delivered better cross-channel performance and repeat behaviour. Today, 55–60% of Boba Bhai’s new customer acquisition comes from offline walk-ins, while 40–45% originates online through delivery platforms, quick commerce, and social discovery, the bubble tea brand told Exchange4Media.

Deepthi Nair, Co-founder of Happy Monk, says the brand often heard consumers say they had seen it on Instagram but were waiting to experience the product before buying. In a category like frozen foods, she notes, communication alone couldn’t close the loop, sampling and physical presence became essential in converting awareness into adoption. Currently, new customer acquisition is roughly an 80:20 split in favour of online, largely because the brand has only recently entered retail. However, offline is growing much faster than expected, with exhibitions and retail stores helping the brand reach consumers who either don’t shop online or prefer discovering new food brands in physical environments.

For legacy omnichannel players, the shift looked less like reinvention and more like acceleration. Avi Kumar, CMO at FNP, said omnichannel has always been core to the brand’s DNA, but 2025 reinforced that discovery no longer follows a fixed path. A customer might discover a product on social, seek reassurance through a store or conversation, and complete the purchase anywhere. In this environment, he argues, every touchpoint, from stores and WhatsApp to customer service and delivery, effectively becomes media.

How Convergence Rewired The Media Mix

As brands expanded offline, marketing teams were forced to confront a deeper shift: the collapse of clear boundaries between discovery, experience, and conversion. Offline retail was no longer just a trust-building layer, it became a mechanism for faster conversion and deeper engagement, feeding directly back into online performance. This convergence fundamentally altered how media mixes were planned.

Pooja Merani, COO of Wacoal India, noted that as consumers trade up, they actively seek fit assurance, consultation, and tactile experience, behaviours that cannot be fulfilled by digital touchpoints alone. As a result, Wacoal’s media strategy has evolved into a far more balanced and holistic mix. Online–offline convergence, she said, has driven increased investments in retail media and marketplaces, influencing high-intent shoppers closer to the point of purchase, while simultaneously strengthening offline touchpoints through improved store visibility, in-store storytelling, and experiential engagement. Physical stores, in this model, are no longer just points of sale; they have become critical brand touchpoints within a full-funnel reality, supported by digital discovery rather than separated from it.

That same logic is playing out across D2C categories. As Madhav Kasturia, Founder & CEO of Zippee, puts it, Indian D2C has moved from experimentation to execution. Physical stores are evolving into demand engines, return hubs, and customer education points, while digital layers ensure speed, data, and repeat behaviour. The brands winning in 2025, he argues, are those treating offline and online as one integrated system, not parallel channels.

This shift also changed how effectiveness itself was defined. Vidita Kochar Jain, Co-founder of Jewelbox, says the biggest change in 2025 was planning media around customer journeys instead of channels. A customer might discover the brand on Instagram, research on the website, and complete the purchase either online or in-store, and the media mix now mirrors that fluidity. Digital plays the role of discovery and education, while offline retail delivers conversion and experience. For Jewelbox, effectiveness is no longer measured purely in reach or clicks. “A channel became effective if it moved the customer closer to trust,” Jain explained. In-store experiences, founder-led content, and high-quality educational storytelling proved just as impactful as paid performance channels.

A similar rebalancing is underway at Lucira, where the convergence reinforced, rather than disrupted, existing thinking. “The rise of retailers turning into marketplaces, confirmed that discovery now happens across multiple touchpoints. While performance marketing remains critical for efficiency and measurability, it can no longer work in isolation. Greater emphasis is now placed on brand storytelling, in-store experience, and trust-building,” said Rupesh Jain, Co-Founder, Lucira.

Media planning, in this context, has become ecosystem-led. Digital performance, physical store visibility, local community marketing, and even traditional formats like hoardings and newspaper inserts are designed to reinforce one another. The objective as per experts is consistency: wherever the consumer encounters the brand, the experience must feel familiar and memorable.

This convergence has also forced marketers to rethink what counts as an effective channel. Some traditional digital formats, such as email and SMS, have declined in impact, while newer touchpoints, including AI-driven search and recommendation systems, are opening more intent-led and organic discovery paths. Effectiveness, marketers increasingly agree, is no longer about the channels they once trusted, but about the ones consumers trust today.

As marketers observe, 2025 didn’t introduce omnichannel behaviour, it finally made it unavoidable.