Ask a D2C founder to list their distribution channels and they’ll name Meta, Google, Instagram creators, maybe a quick-commerce listing. Ask them about the kirana store two streets from their warehouse, and most won’t have an answer, because it never occurred to them that a shop they don’t sell through is still a channel they could be using.
The reach nobody bids for
A neighborhood kirana or chemist gets visited by the same fifty to two hundred households multiple times a week, for years. That’s a frequency and tenure no app notification earns, and it comes with something performance marketing can’t buy: the shopkeeper’s implicit endorsement. A product doesn’t have to be sold there to benefit from being visible there - a decal, a small shelf-talker, a QR code to a WhatsApp catalog near the billing counter puts the brand inside a transaction the customer already trusts, at a moment they’re not scrolling past ads, they’re standing still waiting for change.
The media cost for that placement is negotiated in hundreds of rupees a month, not programmatic auctions. Almost no D2C brand treats it as inventory worth buying, because nobody at the brand has a job title that covers “retail signage for stores we don’t supply.”
Why this got skipped, not ignored on purpose
It isn’t that founders rejected the channel. It’s that it doesn’t exist in any ad platform’s dashboard, doesn’t have a self-serve buying interface, and doesn’t scale by increasing a budget slider - it scales by someone physically walking into stores, negotiating with owners one at a time, and managing print runs. Every incentive in a lean team points toward the channel that reports back in real time over the one that requires a person in a car.
That tradeoff made sense when most of a brand’s growth budget went further on digital. It makes less sense now that digital CAC in most D2C categories has roughly doubled over five years while kirana footfall, in tier two and tier three towns especially, has stayed the steadiest purchase occasion in the country.
What it would take to run it like a channel
Treat it the way a brand treats an ad network: a named owner, a monthly spend line, a simple creative kit a field rep can hand a shopkeeper in under a minute, and a tracking mechanism - a unique QR code per decal is enough - so the data comes back instead of disappearing into goodwill. The brands that will look early to this in two years aren’t the ones with a bigger offline budget. They’re the ones who stopped treating “doesn’t show up in the dashboard” as the same thing as “doesn’t work.”