D2C Operations · India

Your ops are
bleeding
₹65,000
every month.

We know this before you tell us anything. We study your marketplace reviews, calculate your RTO by category benchmark, and estimate your leakage from the outside. Then we walk in and fix it — permanently.

₹320
lost per order · avg beauty D2C
58%
COD return rate · festive peak
80%
D2C brands that never turn profitable
ops
Scroll
RTO reduction 3PL renegotiation Cash conversion cycle Inventory rebalancing SOP documentation Vendor management Unit economics fix Working capital RTO reduction 3PL renegotiation Cash conversion cycle Inventory rebalancing SOP documentation Vendor management Unit economics fix Working capital
The diagnosis

Where your brand
might be stuck.

It is almost never the product. It is almost always the plumbing. The leakage could be hiding anywhere in your operation — but these are the failure points we find most often in Indian D2C.

01
Your 3PL is overbilling you and you don't know it
Hover to reveal

Ask yourself one question: what is your true landed cost per order — not the quoted rate, the actual number after weight disputes, COD charges, RTO fees, and adjustments? If you can't answer to the rupee, someone else is doing that math. And they're not doing it for you.

You're paying a number you've never calculated.
02
Your RTO problem starts at checkout, not at delivery
Hover to reveal

NDR management, better packaging, courier switching — these address the 20%. The 80% lives in checkout: COD availability by pin-code risk tier, prepaid incentive design, address verification. Fixing NDR while your checkout produces low-intent COD orders is mopping with the tap running.

Mopping with the tap running.
03
Working capital is the actual crisis
Hover to reveal

Manufacturing on net-30. Sitting on 55 days of inventory. Getting T+7 settlement from Meesho. The result is a permanently negative cash conversion cycle that no amount of revenue growth can outrun.

A structural cash problem wearing ops clothing.
04
Your operation runs on one person's memory
Hover to reveal

No SOPs. No escalation matrix. When your warehouse manager calls in sick, shipments stop. When your ops person quits, institutional knowledge walks out. You are not running an operation.

You are managing a dependency.
The work

One entry point.
Everything after is earned.

A fixed entry product that stands completely alone. A custom fix engagement offered only after it. Nothing sold cold. Nothing sold on faith.

Product 01
The Investigation
Fixed fee · Three weeks · Standalone

A complete teardown of your operation — not a scan, not a scorecard, not a 72-hour diagnostic. We go inside your data and your warehouse and find what nobody inside your business was positioned to find.

The report is complete and valuable even if you do nothing after. That completeness is the trust signal — we are not doing a cheap diagnostic to manufacture a reason to continue.

What you receive
  • Warehouse visit in Week 2 — mandatory. Ops cannot be diagnosed from a spreadsheet alone.
  • Six months of order data, 3PL invoices, and unit economics rebuilt from scratch and benchmarked against market rates.
  • A four-page report — not twenty-five. Top five findings. Exact rupee impact per month per finding. Prioritised fix list.
  • Your D2C Ops Score out of 100. A re-score at engagement end shows exact movement across five dimensions.
  • An honest recommendation on what is fixable, in what order, and what isn't — regardless of whether you continue.
The guarantee

Miss the target?
30% of the fee is waived.

The outcome conditions for the Fix engagement are written into the agreement before a single day of work begins.

0%

Of the total fee waived if we don't meet the target

Before Day 1, you and us agree on three specific, measurable outcomes. RTO down to X%. 3PL cost below ₹Y/order. Cash conversion cycle at Z days or better. If those agreed targets are not met by the agreed date, 30% of the total fee is waived.

This is not a goodwill clause — it is a structural condition written into every Fix engagement before work starts. The alignment is simple: we only earn our full fee when you see your full result. That is how serious professional services should work, and almost none of them actually do this.

For those who want continuity

The Ops Partner.

Not a product we pitch. A relationship we formalise — only after the Fix is complete, the playbook exists, and the results are documented.

Monthly retainer · Six month minimum
Fractional
Ops Partner

At this stage we have four-plus months inside your business. We know every vendor, every process, every constraint. This is not a new relationship — it is an existing one, formalised on structured terms.

Available only to founders who have completed the Fix engagement. Never offered as a standalone product.

What is included
  • One major initiative per month — scoped and agreed at the start of each month, owned end to end. Not a task list. One thing done completely.
  • Weekly ops review call — 45 minutes. You see what is moving in the wrong direction before it becomes a crisis. Numbers reviewed, not reported to you.
  • Vendor management and escalation — 3PL SLA misses, renegotiation triggers, new vendor evaluation. You stop being the person who makes these calls.
  • Two to three SOPs documented per month — ops knowledge that stays in the business when people leave, not in someone's head.
  • Async WhatsApp availability — when something breaks, you send one message. Response within three hours. Not next week.
Protection · Ongoing

Fix stops today's leakage.
Watchtower stops it from coming back.

The failure points we fix have a habit of quietly reopening. Investigation finds the leaks. The Fix closes them. Watchtower is the ongoing watch that keeps them closed.

Monthly retainer · Ongoing
The Watchtower

A Fix is a snapshot. Leakage is a moving target. Carriers change SLAs quietly. Billing errors reappear every time a rate card updates or a warehouse changes packaging. RTO patterns shift with every season and every new SKU. Watchtower exists because the gate you paid to close does not stay closed on its own.

Currently onboarding a limited number of Watchtower clients.

What is watched
  • COD remittance accuracy — every payout cycle cross-checked against orders shipped, to the rupee.
  • RTO and NDR rate movement against your established baseline — flagged the week it drifts, not the quarter after.
  • Carrier SLA adherence — delivery TAT, weight and dimension billing disputes raised while they are still disputable.
  • Anomaly flags the moment any metric breaks its established range — automated cross-checks every billing cycle, human judgment on every flag.
How it runs

One monthly report you can read in ten minutes. Threshold alerts when a number breaks its range. A short review call only when a flag needs a decision — not a standing meeting.

01 · One-time
Investigation
Diagnose.
Fixed fee · Three weeks
02 · One-time
Fix
Recover.
Custom fee · 70/30 outcome-defined
03 · Ongoing
Watchtower
Protect.
Retainer · Keeps the gate closed

The Ops Partner sits alongside Watchtower as a parallel post-Fix path — Watchtower keeps the gate closed, the Ops Partner keeps the operator. Neither is offered before the Fix is complete.

Right fit

Who we work
with. Who we don't.

One operator, doing the work at the depth it requires. That sets the pace of what we take on and how deep each engagement goes.

Right fit

Bootstrapped D2C brands doing ₹5L–₹25L/month with real revenue and broken backend operations
Fashion, beauty, or lifestyle brands with RTO above 28% — the problem is quantifiable, fixable, and the savings are calculable to the rupee
Founders who want problems fixed — not frameworks delivered, not a strategy deck to show investors
Brands willing to share actual data: order CSVs, 3PL invoices, P&L. Ops cannot be fixed on assumptions.
Founders who can give us two hours in Week 1 to walk us through their operations personally

Wrong fit

Funded startups in "extend runway" mode — you are cutting burn, not adding external engagements
Pre-revenue or very early stage — ops is not your problem yet. Come back at ₹5L/month.
Brands with no ops data — if you cannot tell us your RTO percentage today, start there first
Anyone expecting results in two weeks — real fixes take 45–60 days to show in data. That is physics, not a caveat.
Founders who want to stay at arm's length — this engagement requires access, not just sign-off
The operator

One person.
That is the point.

No team, no junior subcontract, no account manager between you and the work. The person who signs the engagement does every hour of it.

H
Harshad Wankhade
Founder · ScaleOps Lab
"More than two years in cash logistics taught me one thing above everything else: every operation is either held up by systems, or by one person's memory. In D2C, it is almost always the second — and that person is almost always the founder."

More than two years as Operations Manager in cash logistics — managing ground operations, P&L, vendor negotiations, and cost optimisation in an environment where process failures carry immediate, measurable cost. The mechanics of ops — vendor contracts, cost structures, escalation systems, invoice discipline — do not change with the product category.

The pattern in D2C is consistent: a founder who is exceptional at product, brand, or marketing — forced by necessity into an ops role they were never meant to carry. The systems, SOP frameworks, and diagnostic methodology behind ScaleOps Lab are built specifically around handing that role back.

ScaleOps Lab is intentionally small and currently in its founding phase. The work is identical to what it will be at ten times the size — the evidence base is being built. That honesty is deliberate.

800+
Service points managed
2+
Yrs ops management
54
Point leakage diagnostic
Apply

Tell us about
your ops problem.

Every application is reviewed personally within 48 hours. If your situation looks like something we can fix, we will tell you and propose a call. If it isn't, we will tell you honestly and point you toward what might actually help.

Or connect on WhatsApp →

Prefer email? Drop a line at harshad@scaleops-lab.com

Applications reviewed within 48 hours