D2C Operations · India

Your ops is
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
3
active clients · hard cap, always
ops
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

Three reasons
your brand is stuck.

It is almost never the product. It is almost always the plumbing — and the plumbing has specific failure points that account for 90% of operational leakage in Indian D2C.

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

Market rate for fulfillment in metro India is ₹11–14/order. Most unoptimised brands pay ₹18–24. That gap — multiplied by monthly order volume — is pure extraction. The 3PL account manager who tells you everything is fine is doing his job. His job is not your job.

₹11–14/order. Market rate.
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

Two products.
No menu.

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
₹60,000
Fixed · 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

Complete. Or
you don't pay.

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

0%

Second tranche waived if conditions are unmet

The 40% completion tranche is not paid if the three agreed outcome conditions are not fully met. This is not a goodwill clause — it is a structural condition written into every Fix engagement before a single day of work begins.

What this means in practice: 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 all three are not met by the agreed date, the second tranche does not get invoiced.

This creates a very simple alignment: we do not make our full fee unless you see your full result. That is not a generous policy. That is just how serious professional services should work — and almost none of them actually do this.

After the engagement

One year later,
two days.

Not a retainer. Not a subscription. Not a hotline. Once a year, we come back for two days.

₹40K
Per year · Not per month

Two days of serious attention from someone who already knows your business deeply. No pitch required after a successful engagement — it is an obvious yes for any founder who went through a full Fix.

2
Days · Planned in advance

We review what has changed. Update the playbook. Renegotiate what needs renegotiating. Spend an hour with whoever is new on the ops team. Then we leave until next year.

0
Monthly invoices · Ever

Founders understand annual health checks intuitively. You service your car once a year. The CA comes once for annual filings. This is the same category — normal, bounded, clearly useful.

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.

₹50K
Per month · Six month minimum
Fractional
Ops Partner

At this stage we have six-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.
The one discipline that makes this work

The monthly priority agreement — one major initiative scoped clearly at the start of each month, nothing more. Founders remember the one thing that got fixed, not the ten calls that happened. Scope creep is what kills every fractional arrangement. This prevents it structurally.

Right fit

Who we work
with. Who we don't.

We take three active clients. Not four. Not five. Three — because that is the honest capacity of one operator doing this work with the depth it requires.

Right fit

Bootstrapped D2C brands doing ₹5L–₹20L/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 the warehouse in person

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 ₹3L/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.

A
Arjun Mehta
Founder · ScaleOps Lab
"I spent six years watching D2C brands haemorrhage cash on problems that had known fixes. The frustration of knowing the answer and not being in a position to implement it is what started this."

Eight years inside Indian D2C operations — as Head of Ops at a ₹40Cr fashion brand, then as the person called in when two bootstrapped beauty brands were about to run out of cash. Both recovered. One crossed ₹2Cr/month within fourteen months of the engagement ending.

The pattern is always the same: a founder who is deeply good at product, brand, or marketing — and has had to become an amateur ops person by necessity. The ops role was never theirs to carry. Handing it back is what the work is actually about.

ScaleOps Lab is intentionally small. Three clients. No employees. The constraint is structural — it is how the quality of access is protected. You will not be handed to someone who read the same framework last month.

8+
Years in D2C Ops
₹2Cr
Leakage Recovered
14
Engagements Completed
Founding phase

Where the practice
actually is.

The honest answer about pricing today versus where it goes — and why that honesty matters.

The first two engagements are priced differently.

The model above — ₹60K investigation, ₹1.2L–3.2L fix — is what we charge when we have documented proof. Two or three case studies with real numbers: "RTO reduced from 34% to 17% in 11 weeks. Cash freed: ₹2.2L/month."

Without that proof the market cannot verify the fee. And in Indian B2B professional services, unverified premium pricing creates suspicion, not authority.

₹40,000
Founding investigation
₹80K – 1L
Founding fix engagement

This is not a discount. The quality of the work is identical. The evidence base is different.

Any experienced operator knows this and is comfortable saying it plainly: "I charge ₹40,000 for this right now because I am building my proof base. In twelve months the fee will be ₹60,000 because I will have three documented case studies."

That kind of clarity — knowing exactly where you are in building a practice, and being honest about it — is more impressive to most serious founders than any pricing architecture. It signals that you understand how professional services actually work. Which, in this market, is rare.

We are currently taking founding client applications. If you are a bootstrapped D2C brand doing ₹5L–₹20L/month with an ops problem you have been carrying for more than 90 days, we want to talk.

Apply

Tell us about
your ops problem.

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

Or reach out on WhatsApp · Applications reviewed within 48 hours