How did an Indian brand like Tilfi Banaras sell direct to 30+ countries from its own store?
Tilfi built a genuinely differentiated, story-led product (Banarasi weaves) that doesn't need marketplace discovery, customers actively search it out, which is what makes an own-store-first strategy viable instead of marketplace-first. The lesson for most D2C brands isn't 'skip Amazon,' it's that an own-store global strategy only works when your brand and content do real acquisition work on their own. Read the founder's account before assuming your category can skip marketplaces too.
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Features Tilfi Banaras founder Udit Khanna on scaling a luxury Indian textile brand to 30+ countries via direct-to-consumer, not marketplaces, the clearest India case study for own-store-first global.
A blunter take than most vendor content, it argues global D2C on Shopify is a business-model transformation (tax, cross-border shipping, support), not a technical integration, which is the honest expectation-setting founders need.
