For years, India’s new-age pet brands followed a familiar playbook: launch online, build a loyal D2C audience, control the narrative, and grow through digital marketing. That approach worked-until it didn’t.
As customer acquisition costs rise and online growth begins to plateau, many digitally native pet brands are discovering a simple truth: physical retail is no longer optional if scale is the goal.
Across India, pet care startups born online are now opening brick-and-mortar stores-not as a retreat from digital, but as a natural next step in their evolution.
Digitally native brands are those that started online, selling directly to consumers through their own websites and marketplaces. In the early stages, this model offered speed, data, and margin control. But it also came with limits-especially in a category like petcare, where trust, trial, and education matter deeply.
Physical retail solves many of these challenges.
A presence in stores allows brands to:
In India, where many pet parents are still first-generation owners, seeing a product on a shelf-recommended by a store associate-often carries more weight than a digital ad.
Rather than choosing between online and offline, successful brands are now designing hybrid distribution strategies.
Typically, this looks like:
This approach allows brands to expand their reach without sacrificing the customer relationships they have built online.
In India, pet-focused retail chains and curated marketplaces-such as Heads Up For Tails and Supertails-have become important partners in this expansion, offering brands both scale and category credibility.
Moving into retail does come with trade-offs.
Compared to direct-to-consumer sales, offline distribution usually means:
For digital-first brands, this requires a mindset shift. Retail is not always about maximising margins-it is about customer acquisition, visibility, and long-term brand building.
Smart brands account for this by:
When done right, retail doesn’t dilute the brand-it strengthens it.
India’s petcare market is still maturing. Unlike Western markets, where vets drive many purchase decisions, Indian pet parents often rely on:
Offline retail plays a crucial role in influencing these decisions. For digitally native brands, remaining online-only can limit exposure to a large and still-growing segment of pet owners.
Physical presence also signals seriousness. For many consumers, a brand that exists only online still feels experimental. A brand on a shelf conveys a sense of established presence.
The move into retail is not a rejection of digital-first thinking-it’s an extension of it.
Brands that succeed will be those that:
In today’s environment, growth doesn’t come from choosing one channel over another. It comes from making channels work together.
For India’s digitally native pet brands, the path forward is clear:
from clicks to counters, from followers to footfall, from D2C to truly omnichannel.
That’s not a step backwards.
That’s what scale looks like.
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