In this episode of DilSe Omni, Ankur Khaitan, Principal at Fireside Ventures, shares how India's leading venture capital firms evaluate consumer brands, why omnichannel has become non-negotiable, and what founders must do to build iconic businesses in the next decade.
I began our conversation with a big number: India’s retail market, estimated at roughly $1 trillion in 2025, could reach nearly $2 trillion by 2030. But the more interesting question was not simply how large retail could become. It was how brands would participate in that growth.
Ankur’s answer brought the conversation back to the person who matters most: the consumer.
Customers are already moving comfortably between digital discovery and physical shopping. They do not organise their lives around our channel structures. For founders, the challenge is to build a brand that follows that behaviour rather than trying to redirect it.
Table of Contents
1. India’s Retail Opportunity Is About More Than Market Size
2. The Most Important Shift: From Channel First to Consumer First
3. Why Digital-Native Brands Are Building Physical Stores
4. A Practical Framework: Discover, Experience, Buy
5. New-Age Brands Are Becoming Destinations
6. Social Discovery Can Lead to a Store Visit
7. What Founders Should Take Back to Their Teams
The Next Phase of Retail Belongs to Connected Brands
1. India’s Retail Opportunity Is About More Than Market Size
A growing market creates room for more businesses. A changing market creates room for different kinds of businesses. India’s retail opportunity combines both.
During our discussion, I highlighted the projected shift in unorganised retail’s share from around 85% to 65%. Even with that declining share, the segment could still grow substantially in absolute terms because the overall market is expanding.
That distinction matters. The story is not simply that one retail format disappears while another takes over. It is that the market grows while its composition changes.
For consumer brands, this means thinking about two opportunities together:
Market expansion: Participating in the growth of overall retail spending.
Structural change: Serving consumers as organised retail and connected shopping experiences become more prominent.
Ankur sees omnichannel as a central driver of this next phase. His reasoning is grounded in behaviour: consumers are comfortable discovering unfamiliar brands, exploring new products, and then choosing where they want to experience and purchase them.
My takeaway was simple: a large market is the backdrop, but understanding the customer’s journey is what makes the opportunity actionable.
2. The Most Important Shift: From Channel First to Consumer First
The clearest lesson from Ankur was also the simplest.
“It is not about channel first, but it’s more about consumer first.”
Ankur Khaitan
We often describe businesses as online brands, offline brands, or D2C brands. Those labels help us discuss distribution. They are less useful when they start defining what the customer is allowed to do.
A consumer might discover a product online, visit a store to experience it, and purchase there. Another might first encounter the brand offline and later engage digitally. Ankur’s point was that both directions are natural.
The boundary has blurred because consumers are comfortable crossing it.
That changes the founder’s question. Instead of asking, “Should we prioritise online or offline?”, the better question becomes, “What does the customer need at this stage of the decision?”
Sometimes the need is discovery. Sometimes it is physical experience. Sometimes it is the confidence that comes from trying something before buying.
Omnichannel is not merely having multiple places to sell. It is allowing those places to serve one customer journey.
3. Why Digital-Native Brands Are Building Physical Stores
One moment in our conversation made the scale of this shift tangible. Ankur shared his expectation that Fireside’s portfolio brands could open more than 500 exclusive brand outlets, or EBOs, over the next four to five years.
He described this as his hunch, not a formal commitment. Even with that qualification, it was a striking indication of the direction he sees brands taking.
These are not necessarily businesses abandoning digital. They are businesses extending the relationship they have already begun building.
Ankur connected that confidence to the evolution of the ecosystem. Founders have experimented, learned, and developed omnichannel playbooks. As those capabilities mature, they become more comfortable taking brands offline.
But an important condition sat inside his explanation: the right time and the right strategy.
That is very different from opening stores because offline expansion has become fashionable. The lesson is not that every D2C brand should immediately build a large retail network. It is that physical retail can become a meaningful growth channel when its role is clear.
For me, the useful distinction is between expanding a footprint and expanding the brand’s ability to serve consumers. The second should explain the first.
4. A Practical Framework: Discover, Experience, Buy
To make Ankur’s consumer-first thinking practical, I would organise the discussion into a simple framework: Discover, Experience, Buy. This is my synthesis of our conversation, not a formal Fireside investment framework.
Discover: Where does the brand enter the customer’s mind?
Digital platforms have become an important place for consumers to encounter brands, concepts, and products. A customer may begin forming a preference well before entering a store.
The question for a founder is not just whether the brand has a digital presence. It is whether that presence gives people something meaningful to remember and explore.
Experience: What does the customer need to understand physically?
Discovery does not always resolve the purchase decision. Consumers may want to experience the product in person, particularly when trying it or understanding its fit matters.
This is where offline retail can complement digital discovery. The store gives the customer a way to move from interest to a more informed choice.
Buy: Can the customer purchase through their preferred channel?
Ankur emphasised that consumers interact with brands through the channel of their choice. That choice should guide the design of the journey.
The framework is not a rigid sequence. Someone can discover offline and purchase online. Its purpose is to separate customer needs from channel labels.
Applied together, the three questions become:
Where are we being discovered?
Where does the customer gain confidence?
Where does the customer prefer to complete the purchase?
If the answers involve different channels, that is not necessarily a problem to eliminate. It may be the journey the business needs to support.
5. New-Age Brands Are Becoming Destinations
Ankur made another observation that deserves attention: new-age brands are becoming anchors for footfall on high streets and in malls.
“The new-age brands are the new anchors.”
Ankur Khaitan
That suggests a changing relationship between brands and retail locations. A brand is not only opening a store to access existing traffic. In some cases, it is becoming part of the reason people visit.
For me, this connects directly to the discovery discussion. When consumers already know a brand and want to experience it, physical presence can give that interest a destination.
Importantly, Ankur did not frame omnichannel as an advantage reserved for startups. Established brands have also built their digital capabilities. The movement is happening from both directions: digital-native businesses are extending offline, while traditional businesses are strengthening online.
The convergence matters more than the starting point. Across categories, the strategic conversation is increasingly about how physical and digital experiences work together.
6. Social Discovery Can Lead to a Store Visit
Towards the end of our conversation, I described digital media as the new television: an environment where people spend time and encounter brands.
The implication is not that every discovery must produce an immediate online sale. A digital interaction can influence a purchase that happens elsewhere.
I shared an example from a conversation with someone in wedding retail. Customers were taking screenshots of products they found on social media and using those references as they moved towards a purchase.
In that category, discovery can happen on a screen while trying the product and discussing size customisation still require a physical interaction.
The screenshot becomes a small but useful bridge between those moments. It carries the customer’s interest from one setting into another.
This is why I find an online-versus-offline debate limiting. A social post and a store visit may look like separate activities inside a business, but to the customer they can be parts of the same decision.
The practical lesson is to think beyond the first interaction: once someone finds a product they like, how do they take the next step?
7. What Founders Should Take Back to Their Teams
I came away from this exchange with three questions that can sharpen an omnichannel strategy.
Are we following consumer behaviour or defending our original channel? A brand’s starting point should not become a constraint on how it serves customers.
Does offline expansion have a clear purpose? Ankur’s emphasis on timing and strategy matters as much as the scale of the store opportunity.
Are discovery and purchase connected? Digital interest needs a useful next step, even when the eventual purchase happens physically.
None of this requires treating every channel as equally important. It requires understanding what each channel contributes.
That, to me, is the central lesson behind India’s D2C expansion into offline retail. The ambition is not simply to become a brand with more stores. It is to become a brand that customers can discover, experience, and buy in ways that suit them.
The Next Phase of Retail Belongs to Connected Brands
India’s projected journey towards a $2 trillion retail market creates a compelling opportunity. Ankur’s perspective helped bring that opportunity down from a market forecast to a practical principle: build around the consumer.
Digital discovery and physical retail are not competing explanations for the future. Increasingly, they are parts of the same explanation.
You can explore the broader conversation in the full episode with Ankur Khaitan.
I am Saurabh Agrawal and we come with a new episode on Dilse omni talks every fortnight and cover different aspect of omnichannel with amazing speakers.
