At our Investor Day earlier this year,Arjun Purkayasthawas on stage — SVP & MD, Reckitt Greater China and North Asia, and one of the sharpest angel investors in the Indian consumer space. He put it simply: only three consumer markets truly matter at global scale — India, China, and the USA. ICU. The largest profit pools lie at the top end of the market.His advice to every founder: learn to sell to the rich.
Later that day, Shashank Mehta told us something from the other direction. The Whole Truth has been built by selling to 5–6 lakh unique customers every month — solving his own problem and finding many consumers facing the same one.
The conventional strategy of building at the bottom or middle of the pyramid is not the only one anymore. The top of this market has grown large enough to sustain a brand for decades, and we’ve barely scratched the surface.
Of India’s 305 million households, only 50-60 million transact on e-commerce, and 25-30 million on quick commerce.The top 4-6 million households drive the premium consumption market.According to Think PRICE, over 11 million households declare income above Rs 30 lakh annually - and with incomes consistently under-reported, real purchasing power runs well above declared figures.
This audience is neatly aggregated in premium gated housing societies and easily reached by quick commerce.She discovers brands through Reels, transacts on platforms and brand websites, and shares purchases on her feed and WhatsApp groups.
An interesting insight from Anish Shrivastava, Head of Revenue at Blinkit, air conditioners were among the most-searched terms in summer on Blinkit. The affluent audience is seeking instant fulfilment in nearly every consumption category.Accessing this consumer has never been easier.
There is a reason why this gap exists in the market. That is the myth of the average consumer – who doesn’t exist anymore. Most FMCG companies market to the statistically average consumer by running a one product, one P&L strategy and one GTM (go-to-market) strategy that gets them stuck in the middle and bottom of the pyramid. This leaves open a white space for new age brands - delight the top end with great products, authentic storytelling and outstanding experience, and you unlock the best profit pool in every category immediately!
The best founders look inward and outward. Shashank turned his personal journey with food labels into the insight that became The Whole Truth. Sangeet and Navin couldn’t find luggage that matched how they saw themselves, so they built Mokobara. The most lucrative audience is you – the founder!
Then outward: this consumer tracks global trends she can’t yet buy domestically — GLP-1 metabolic health, sleep science, premium pet nutrition. Connect a personally-felt insight to one of these inbound waves and you have both a product brief and built-in demand.
Innovist built an R&D lab before designing a single product — a premium brand can’t be built around off-the-shelf formulations.
Ankit Chona — third-generation ice cream entrepreneur — put the first rupee into a greenfield facility in Bavla, producing Oh-Cone and Aamchi to the same standard every day. Capacity scaled from 40,000 to 3 lakh litres a day in three years. Owning scalable manufacturing is the actual moat.
Mokobara hired Morrama, a London design agency, before they had revenue — Japanese Hinomoto wheels, a reinforced shell, a yellow interior that consumer research advised against. Lagom: not too much, not too little. They are now among India’s fastest-growing premium travel lifestyle brands, despite huge skepticism from incumbent market leaders.
EDT, founded by Naiyya Saggi and designer Vyasateja Rao, applied the same logic to home appliances. Luma received 1,000+ pre-orders before shipping — design as the product’s first argument creates demand before a marketing rupee is spent.
Three models have worked with this audience. EDT built community first — tech enthusiasts and home chefs who drove over 1,000 pre-orders before shipping a unit. The Whole Truth built through long-form educative content so uncompromising that when Instagram changed its algorithm, they got off the platform rather than dilute the voice. Innovist made a science-based house of brands built around a common core of proprietary R&D, formulations
and manufacturing. None of them used celebrity endorsements — India’s creator economy, where micro-influencers drive 47% of brand partnerships, is the right distribution layer for all three. Purely superficial design or communication-led brands don’t end up sticking or winning with this audience; depth and authenticity are the key.
A genuine delightful customer experience shared on social media or closed communities delivers way higher ROI than any well-crafted marketing budget. That is why great brands take their post-purchase service experience so seriously – Mokobara’s no-questions-asked returns, The Whole Truth’s personalised letters, or EDT’s Recipe Ramsay AI and user groups where they share recipes are all meant to build delight and pride in being part of the brand. Building this customer love consistently is the most underrated founder superpower.
Four macro areas will drive the biggest CPG (consumer packaged goods) opportunities over the next decade.
Live healthier — GLP-1 adjacent nutrition, sleep and supplements: India is home to over 100 million diabetics, one of the two largest burdens in the world, and no Indian brand has yet built meaningfully in GLP-1 adjacent categories.
Look better — prestige skincare and aesthetic medicine, as the Indian consumer moves from care to transformation.
Feel better — premium parenting, pet care and experiential travel, with pet care running a decade behind global patterns. Premium living — appliances, kitchen and home: each new gated tower is a cohort replacing everything simultaneously, and Redseer expects gated communities to house half of India’s top-50-city households by 2031.
# Start with a specific problem you have personally faced. That specificity is the brief. Delivering 80% to 80% of the audience leads to 0% brand.
# Invest in product quality above all else. Formulation, materials, manufacturing — this is where premium is earned or lost. No brand story survives a product that doesn’t deliver.
# Invest in R&D, design and manufacturing before brand. These are the real moats. The brand story follows the product truth.
# Find the global trend with no Indian product. What your target consumer currently imports is your brief and your validation.
# Pick one brand model and go all the way. Community, education or R&D-led. Doing all three partially earns none of the premium.
# Build service that generates delight. No-questions returns, personalised responses, genuine post-purchase engagement — this is where LTV compounds.
# Price to signal quality, not access. The Whole Truth Foods built a business from a few lakh loyal customers at a genuine premium. You don’t need millions. You need the right hundreds of thousands.
None of this is easy —premium brand building demands real capital, patience, and conviction upfront.But the logic is simple: invest hard in product, R&D, and design first, and marketing to this audience becomes the most natural part of the operation.
Word-of-mouth in a gated community tower travels faster than any paid campaign.
Building premium brands in India is a generational non-cyclical opportunity, whose time has come.
Disclosure: These are learnings from Sauce’s experience investing in India’s new-age premium consumer brands. Sauce is an investor in several companies referenced in this article.
(Yash Dholakia is at Sauce, a consumer-focused Venture Capital Fund.)
Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.
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