Digitally assisted, not digital

Vaidya's claim is that India's e-commerce debate keeps asking the wrong question. Online is barely six per cent of Indian retail — up from four, seven on a generous count — and general trade still moves the bulk of the country's goods, yet almost every purchase now passes through a phone before it happens. He calls the result digitally assisted commerce, and his evidence is his own family's luxury watch and jewellery business, average order value ten lakh rupees and up, which now books 22% of sales digitally even though only a tenth of that is actually swiped online; the rest is Instagram Reels, virtual appointments and then a walk into the store. From there the argument widens. The narrative counts six to ten thousand D2C brands; he thinks the real number is past thirty thousand, and the 1,250 brands that have come through the weekend cohort he runs with his wife are only the sliver that showed up. That density has eaten the margin for error — he had a year to learn performance marketing while building Dr. Vaidya's, and reckons a founder today gets three months, because D2C has become a technical business of processes, dispatch times and listings rather than a story about a product. And the customer has changed shape: Gen Z is not fickle but fiercely, publicly loyal, an Indian niche holds ten million addressable customers — the population of a European country — and aspiration now travels through gateway brands, because the kid who has seen the ₹1 lakh sneaker on Instagram buys the affordable lookalike first and the real thing a decade later.