Ep 8: Kirti’s take on how D2C Fashion Meets Sustainability

Kaus Manjita
All right, I'll go through a quick intro and then we'll get started.

All right, welcome back. Today I'm gonna start a little different. If a brand is equal to a voice and product is the souvenir, then today's episode is all about a good strong kinship between the brand and the customer, right? So this is the next episode of season two, Shelf, the building blocks of commerce, I'm Kaust. And today I'm with Kati, Kati Punia. She's the CEO and co-founder of Relove.

which is a fashion tech platform that powers brands to contribute positively to the circular economy. And we know how that's a very important part of how consumers buy and think today. So, Real Up team is currently firing over 60 brands globally. They're also backed by Google's Circular Economy Accelerator program. And congrats, Kirti, on that. That's a super good achievement.

Kirti Poonia
Thank you.

Kaus Manjita
Awesome. And as a founder, KT's work has always been meaningful, grounded in the reality of the world, from efforts geared towards empowerment and protection of ancient art, art and craft, to promoting environmental sustainability and development, not just in India, but globally. So I'm very, very excited to speak to her today.

And the topic of today's conversation is going to be how a D2C fashion meets sustainability in the contemporary commerce landscape. So let's dive in. Katie, I'm first of all, super excited to have you here. And you have a really long and extensive, deep experience in D2C and specifically in sustainability in some way or the other, right? You started your work, building Okhai and a lot of consumers in India have definitely heard about that and bought from there. It powered more than, I think about 30,000 artisans and today you're doing something very meaningful for Gen Zs and it's becoming more and more meaningful for a lot of us as we think about sustainability and how we can leave a better footprint back on the world.

Kaus Manjita
And Relove, it's a fashion tech company, very, very strong focus on sustainability. What I want you to share is a little bit inside into this journey, right? And what made you think about joining this specific, I would say vertical within fashion overall and the driving forces fundamentally of you as a human being that makes you think about this.

Kirti Poonia
Firstly, super excited to be speaking with you. Very excited to be here. In sustainable fashion, there are two main problems. One is a social problem of fashion, right? The wages for artisans, the conditions, the living conditions, the working conditions. And then you have the environmental aspect, which is the impact of making every single product on the planet almost equals to six times its weight.

Kirti Poonia
in CO2. Fashion today is one of the largest contributors of CO2 emissions, greater than all flights and all shipping combined. So your clothes have a larger footprint than all the flights we are taking. If you look at both of these problems, Okhai was centric around solving the first problem, which is the social problem. We were creating livelihood for women artisans across the country.

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And somewhere while traveling to these villages, I started to see the increase in plastic pollution and what it was doing to these beautiful beaches, pristine beaches of Gujarat, where I used to see blue water and now I was swimming next to a milk packet. I could really see that, you know, descent happening across the last five years. I started to feel a lot for the environmental problem. And I believe in building capitalistic solutions to social and environmental problems. Because if it's a profitable business model, then consumers are going to adopt it, brands are going to adopt it. And hence the desire to build Relove. At the same time, I think working in D2C, I had this core insight that there were customers of ours who had a hundred pieces across sizes as they increased or lost weight and they were buying different sizes and they were no longer wearing the ones that they had in their wardrobe. And that encouraged Pratik, my co-founder and I to build a circular economy in fashion where brands could extend the lives of their garments by simply enabling brand-owned resale where they simply put it's a resale button in the customer's order history on a brand's website.

Kaus Manjita
Hmm.

Kirti Poonia
Very soon we launched rescue where brands can also liquidate damaged inventory, which also is often burned or thrown away, causing not only financial losses to the brand, but also huge environmental emissions.

Kaus Manjita
Yeah, that's very powerful. You know, when you think about it, it's a very, very powerful problem and a very powerful solution. And I saw something on your website, good brands design, great ones think of their life cycle. Double click on that a little bit for the audience here.

Kirti Poonia
So, you know, we today don't know what happens to a dress after it is bought from us, right? After a fashion brand sells it. But when you do resale, you actually learn about what is happening to that product in the market after 10 wears and 10 washes. You know what seams are strong, you know how the fabric is performing. And through resale, especially brand-owned resale, brands are able to get... data on this. A lot of the brands often don't think about how is it going to be discarded after somebody is done using it, right? And recycling has not worked in India. Less than 1% of textile waste is actually getting recycled. Most of it is going into landfills. And because recycling has failed, we know the donation economy is not working.

Kaus Manjita
Yeah.

Kirti Poonia
The resale economy helps brands ensure that there is a life cycle, end of life cycle use for it when one person is done using it. So that's really, in a way, distinguishing brands who embrace resale and circularity from others who don't.

Kaus Manjita
Hmm, yeah, that's, that's, you know, leads me to one, you know, thought, right, like a train of thought that I want to sort of tug on. Um, uh, they used to be over time, there always is like all these second goods marketplace and the word term seconds, seconds and second hand and second good itself comes with that connotation, right? Like what has been even before we, uh, you know, dive into what's happening today, what, what me a little bit through like this shift in the landscape, like what shifted in consumer behavior and consumer thinking and specifically in a region like India, where we used to think about secondhand goods as things that you just want to discard literally, right? Something's broken throw it away like quicker, but they store right and then moving to something which is more connected to the future in some way. Like walk us through this mental shift that you've observed.

Kirti Poonia
I'd say there have been phases. In old Indian times, we would never discard. We would give it to family members who lived in a joint family together. All the clothes would be passed on from one person to another. Somewhere down the line, cheaper clothes started coming in and they started being discarded or given away and being discarded by people we gave them away to. Today, one third of textile waste from Mumbai itself is textile or municipal waste is textile. So we feel our conscience is clear when we give it away, but it is actually being thrown. And then came the pandemic. The habit of reselling was not inculcated, but people were now sitting at home looking into their wardrobes. By the time, and they were cleaning their wardrobes, right? And they were really letting go of what doesn't fit. I think people were looking at the world in a different way. People were looking at... the environment and how it cleared out those images that were showing up on the internet right after the lockdown began. And when the second wave hit and there was a serious shortage of oxygen cylinders, influencers with millions of followers started selling their wardrobes for oxygen cylinders, which means that, you know, tens and hundreds of million followers were watching people sell their outfits from their wardrobe.

Kirti Poonia
whole new segment in acceptance for thrift. If you see Gen Z today, everyone who's in college has a thrift shop on the side and they DM people and they take their clothes and they photograph them and resell them. So you have like an ecosystem of 500 small thrift stores, which is actually trying to create the circular economy. You have larger thrift shops that are now coming up in India.

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And then you have people like Relove, which is enabling brands to do this themselves, because authenticity has always been of question when we do peer-to-peer resale in India.

Kaus Manjita
Yeah. Yeah. And I've seen, you know, some kind of specific categories of verticals or kinds of products. The reason that I'm, this thoughts coming to my mind is because if I'm thinking about you mentioned something very nostalgic, which is, you know, things getting passed on from generation to generation. My mother still has a lot of her mothers and her grandmothers, you know, very unique, those heavy silk, beautiful saris. I'm from the Northeast a lot of mooga silk and stuff like that. And these are like, they just keep getting better over generations. Like a mooga that's like 40, 50 years old is something that you are like, wow, by today, right? Because it's so much softer, better to use, has a better sheen and so on and so forth. But somewhere along the line, as you said, as time shifted, you know, faster fashion, faster fashion, and today ultra fast fashion with sheen, right? And I'm wearing a sheen top, in fact, I specifically did that for this question.

But these are things that you can't really, you know, have a long, you know, cycle or a relationship with. And this something is like it's on its second where it's almost already at a place where I probably will not be able to utilize it beyond a certain number of times. Right. And so you have on one side like products like Kanji Wormsari, Omuga silks. And on the other hand, you have something like a sheen top, like which is supposed to be ultra fast fashion, very low cost and just use an almost like a, you know, something that you use and almost don't use again sort of a model, right? So where does, how are consumers behaving across these different kinds of product portfolios, right? And I understand for youngsters, that's why I guess it's like tripping. I wore something today. I don't want to wear it again. But how are you seeing different consumer segments, like from Gen Zs across to, you know, as they grow older and their needs change in the product, they utilize change. How do you see this evolving?

Kirti Poonia
You know something that totally surprised me, the data surprised me so much this year. I really thought that it will be the exquisite Kanji Viram sarees that I usually passed on that will be resold. But I think saree as a category, if you have an exquisite saree, it's often not passed on or resold. It's passed on within the family, right? And from a daughter to a daughter-in-law and it's size agnostic, so that's no issue at all. So we started seeing more traction in actual garments that are fitted. And I'm so surprised because we launched with a brand like Snitch, which has value, mass pricing, but we are seeing great traction in resale and even that category, right?

And I don't know that she, if you know, but she and also has a resale program. And that receives a lot of traction. So I think it's something that we've learned this year, that younger audiences, Gen Z that traditionally buys from these brands are more attuned to doing something for the environment and more attuned to the concept of thrifting because they don't have, they don't believe in ownership like we do. Right.

Kaus Manjita
Mm-hmm. Sit down.

Kirti Poonia
they will probably not own a home. They don't want to own their clothes. They want to spend on experiences in life rather than owning garments. And so that is really the demographic, the kind of product that we are seeing traction in.

Kaus Manjita
Got it. And why is this the right time for circular economy? Like it's been, of course, around for a while and conversations for a long while. Right. But how is it? Why do you think this is the right moment? It's coming so much more into prominence. And then even even if APAC in Asia is picking is now, you know, on that. Right. So.

Kirti Poonia
I would still say that it's at a very nascent stage in APAC, for sure. We have many, many different problems to deal with. It's always been a concept that was very popular in the West for good 10 years. US is 10 years ahead of any pattern that India adopts, right? If you see 10 years ago is when large peer-to-peer resale websites came up in the US and you're seeing that pattern emerge in India now. I'd say two things here. One is D2C has matured a little bit. It all started five years ago. So now everybody's done with building their brands, their websites, they have good amount of customers, they have good number of products out there in the market to do resale. So I think it's the maturity stage of the D2C market in India that now it's thinking of circularity because it's planning to also retain its customers that they've built in the last few years. There's also a huge sense of competition, right? Which is amongst all the D2C brands. So they need to do something to retain that consumer offer more services like resale. Sustainability in fashion is become not just good to have now, right? It's become one of those decision makers for the consumer. And more often than not, you have to spend more to be sustainable in fashion. But in thrifting and pre-love, you have to spend lesser to be sustainable. So I think the consumer is also educated and attuned to doing it. So I think a combination of all of these things are creating a market, but I'd still say that it is early. It is absolutely early. And those of us that are building this category,

Kaus Manjita
Yeah.

Kirti Poonia
have to have a lot of patience and have to have the ability to walk in the dark.

Kaus Manjita
What do you mean by that?

Kirti Poonia
There's no precedent, right? You're discovering business models on your own. You're building a category in India. So I feel that you have to discover and tune business models very quickly and educate consumers on your own. Mainly, I think business model innovation is what will win.

Kaus Manjita
Okay, sorry, I got stuck for a minute. Yeah, okay. You have to repeat the last sentence. I got stuck for a minute, yeah.

Kirti Poonia
So I'm saying mainly it's business model innovation that'll win. So I'm going to start with a question from the audience. So I'm going to start with a question from the audience. So I'm going to start with a

Kaus Manjita
Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. And as you were talking about early days over here, like it also, you know, makes me think, Kirti, about when you actually decided to start Re.Love, right, like was there, apart from your personal experience, was there some in the early, like the zero to one days, I would say, of you, hey, this is what I wanna do. It looks like there is a personal need for sure.

And then I'm sure you went about validating, like is there actually, is this the right time? Is this even meaningful for me to walk us through? Like this is always very exciting. I'm sure for a bunch of our listeners who are brand builders themselves, how did you go about now figuring out whether this is the right time?

Kirti Poonia
So I don't know if you know it, right before we started Relove, for three months before that, for three months we were deploying the same model in personal care. So we set up a cleaning factory in the middle of Bombay and we tied up with personal care brands, some of them very large ones like Wilva and Bear Necessities. What we were doing was actually refilling their hand wash, body wash in metal containers, giving it to consumers.

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We ran a milk run throughout Mumbai to deliver and pick up these bottles. And very quickly, we realized that consumer behavior was too drastic a change over there in that category for us to deploy circular solutions. We were clear from the start that we wanted to solve the environment problem. And we thought that circularity is a business viable way to do this. But anything that you come up with, if it's too far from the normal behavior of consumers, it will take a long time. And is it viable? You should really quickly measure and move on. Very quickly, we pivoted to fashion, right? Because we realized that in that category, people are not used to waiting to throw their bottles, right? And they had to pay more to buy a refillable bottle because it had to be cleaned and refilled.

A lot of legal laws were different. To do refill in India, you need a complete manufacturing license, right? Even only refilling a bottle. So you can't have a refill kiosk even in a store for any kind of bottles, which you can actually do across the world. In other places in the US, you do have refill stores for personal care. So we very quickly pivoted. And we launched with the first fashion brand called the Summer House. And when we launched with the Summer House, we realized that it did so well in its first one month. Over a hundred garments were found a new level and how we talk about it in our social media. We have this concept of the new lover and the ex who gave their dress. And he's so very cool. Yeah. Yeah, that is a terrible love.

Kaus Manjita
Real love, it ties into real love, I love it.

Kirti Poonia
Yeah, it's all about branding, right? So I think very quickly we saw success and we saw that people were making money in this business idea. People were doing a good thing in this business idea. You were reducing consumption, you were reducing carbon footprint and somebody else was buying something for love for cheaper, right? So we have to admit the fact that we cannot expect everyone to pay a lot more to be sustainable. It cannot be a luxury item for it to have mass adoption. And very quickly we saw success and I believe that you have to quickly measure and sort of alter your costs. And yeah, so here we are. We heard from brands that they wanted to sell rescue items.

Kaus Manjita
Yeah.

Kirti Poonia
which had small defects in the production cycles. Very quickly we launched that. Consumers were getting very confused as to which website they should go and buy pre-loved from. So then we created this shop page where you can see pre-loved pieces from across different brands. Yeah, so we're basically just learning and deploying now.

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Kaus Manjita
Yeah, that's so much fun, right? Like that is such an exciting phase because you're listening on the ground and you're kind of like iterating and trying to figure out the best, the most optimal path, I would say, to make it. And in all of this, there's also category building, right? So what are some of the learnings, you know, in generally, if you zoom out into category building as a problem on its own, what are some of the early learnings that...

Kirti Poonia
I think authenticity was the biggest problem of this category. And I'll tell you the consumer today in India is so wary because they've all had a bad experience on a buying selling website or on an Instagram thrift shop. Right. They've ordered something and they've got a completely different garment or not got a garment at all. So you're dealing with that customer that you're telling them that I'm going to send you a free love garment, but it's going to be of good quality, right? Or as described by the seller. And I think that challenge is now being solved by tying up with brands and working along with them. So it's a verified transaction that we are reversing, which, and our checks and balances in quality checking in that entire process, you know, from the seller to the buyer and helps us ensure that we have authenticity and good quality. Our damage rate in the last one and a half years of working with 60 brands is less than 1%, which is lesser than often many fashion brands shipping from their own warehouse.

Kaus Manjita
Yeah, that's very true. And what are some of the metrics that you're seeing, which is making this as you were talking about a business decision too, it's not just about the environment or sustainability or the consumer getting a good deal, but it's actually viable for the brand. What are some of the early case studies and metrics over there?

Kirti Poonia
I think everyone's struggling to keep their customers. And through WeLove, we are seeing 12 to 26x ROS on their store credit that they issue to the seller while selling the garment to a buyer. So I mean, 12 to 26 is unheard of in any kind of spend of marketing, right? So the brands are super happy issuing store credit to sellers immense intangible benefits. These customers are fearlessly now buying first-hand pieces from the brand, knowing that should they have made a bad decision or should it not fit them or the color not look right on them, they have the opportunity to liquidate that piece.

Kaus Manjita
Hmm. Are you seeing some interesting patterns over there? Is it actually, I'm sure early days, but anything that you're noticing around, hey, like, you know, people are buying, as you said, more fearlessly, is it in, is it converting into something, some sort of a pattern right now?

Kirti Poonia
I think, you know, this is mainly verbatim. We hear from brand owners and hear from consumers. I think a ton of DMs around, I've started to check if the brand has relove and then buy from the brand. Wow, that is really good because she's actually making sure that she can curate her wardrobe in a certain way, almost like having insurance.

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Kaus Manjita
It is, it is, absolutely.

Kirti Poonia
I have insurance that I can potentially resell this piece should I face a problem using it. I think in terms of loyalty, you see great customer loyalty. We are seeing people come back, sellers who are able to sell, come back and buy something else from the brand. We are seeing new customer acquisition for the brand. So customers who are probably Gen Z or sustainability focused audience or just deal seekers, right?

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So we're seeing 75% new customers coming to the brand for this and a ton of them converting to buying firsthand the next time. So they're trying out the brand through preloved and at their price point comfort zone. And then they come in investing more with the brand.

Got it. And before I dive into the future, not just real love, but more of circular fashion overall, I want to also go back to the past a little bit. And when you were at Okai, which was powering so many different artisans to actually sell on the platform, what were some of the challenges in actually enabling also circular fashion through Okai? So in Okhai, circularities also had its own education sort of wave, right? Like at that time, waste was what circularity meant to us. And using natural materials, what sustainability meant to us. So I remember all the waste that we would generate, we would try and make some small pieces out of it, scrunchies out of it, try and not throw it.

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I don't know if you know this ship cleaners, they want to take your cotton waste to clean the nuts and bolts of oil. And yes, so a lot of these small cotton fabric swatches are in high demand by people who clean ships. And we were like, no, we're not gonna do that because you're gonna clean with this and you're gonna throw it in the ocean.

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Kaus Manjita
In the ocean, right? Yeah, that was what was running in my mind.

Kirti Poonia
So we were like, no, that's not possible. We should not do that. So we tried to make a lot of buttons and things like that and involve that process into the creation of design. I think that's what we really tried to do.

Kaus Manjita
Hmm. In retrospect, what would you know, what do you think, uh, okay, could do differently or if I was like, you know, uh, uh, still, uh, thinking about all of that today, how, how do you think you would have thought?

Kirti Poonia
I think I'm really happy that it's doing real love. First, and you know, one of the things that OKHEE is now doing with rescue, which is the digital factory outlet, is selling damaged pieces. The beautiful story behind that is that OKHEE doesn't penalize artisans for something that has a little stain. You know, they work from home, right? So sometimes there's a little pen mark or some artisans may write their name on the garment because they're like I made it you know. A pen like this is my piece. So consumers may not buy it but Okhai doesn't penalize the artisans and so they are able to actually list these garments with a little window through through Relove and Rescue that showcases the defect and then accordingly is the price. And so able to sell garments with stains etc and they are able to add three to five percent to their revenue. I really wish that you know we've done that back then also and you know it would be a more cumbersome process right now it's more technology enabled but yeah I wish that we'd always done that because now we have a huge piled up inventory which has such small minor defects.

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Kaus Manjita
Yeah. And, you know, coming back to today, you know, one part of the, I would say, e-commerce ecosystem is definitely DTC brands, but another big part, specifically in Asia, is still marketplaces, right? What, and I, you know, it's still not there when it comes to anything like a rescue or real. What do you think would it take for a mint flower or an Amazon fashion or something like that to actually, and why do you think we are not thinking about that?

Kirti Poonia
I think that everyone at some point has thought about it. And I do know that many of them have tried to run pilots, which were not technology enabled. So they took a big bunch of garments and then they struggled to tech enable it as a listing on their website. I feel like everyone will come around. Brands are more directly linked to sustainability because they produce the garment.

Kirti Poonia (30:06.314)
You know, marketplaces have always been tech companies that are basically doing sourcing of products from different places, which also not bare housed with them. Right. So they've never come under the radar for actually the sustainability of the product itself. They've people talk to them about packaging. People talk to them about marketing. Right. So, um, I feel that it, it is inevitable that people will think about it and marketplaces will think about this.

Kaus Manjita
Hmm. And you mentioned something interesting. It was about like the tech enablement on relapse products, right? Like double click a little bit on that. What do you mean by that? It's of course, not just listing the products. That's like something that marketplaces are great at. They do that. That's their bread and butter. But what beyond it is, without disclosing anything specific.

Kirti Poonia
No, for sure. And I don't mind. Yeah, no, I don't mind at all. Because I feel if you don't share what you're doing, how are people supposed to understand it, right? So, by the way, my co-founder, Pratik, he's one of the top hundred engineering product managers in the country, and hence the Relab app is super, super simple and easy to use.

Kaus Manjita
In a framework level, yeah. At a framework level, yeah.

Kirti Poonia
and the whole architecture is phenomenally smooth. You'll see women from Guna in Bihar list their garment. They probably don't read and write in English. And you'll see affluent women from more higher priced brands list their garments with ease. So very simply, we help brands install the Relove app, we're a Shopify approved app. And...

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We also, in case the brand is a non Shopify brand, a more enterprise brand, then we also have a different solution for them, where we build out a microsite where they are able to list, you know, their consumers are able to list their products. It looks and feels like their own website, but their resale program website. Consumers are now able to come back, click on the Resale button in their order history or the Relove page in the menu bar.

And they undergo a few questions. How many times have they worn the garment? Is there a button missing? Is there a thread missing? We understand garments deeply. We know that in blouses, you have to check the underarms. And in saris, you have to check the fall. So we take certain images from the consumers. We list them for sale post-approval on the brand's own website or the microsite. And the buyers coming to this website can buy that product. We enable the entire process between the seller and the buyer, customer care, logistics, packaging, payments, ensuring quality of the product, everything in between, so that the brand doesn't have to set up a resale department to do this. So I'll tell you, we go live in four days after talking to the brand. It's a 30-minute call.

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in which we show them the demo and founders, if they're present in the call, it's an instant yes and it's an instant launch. And in four days, we integrate and we launch. And the real integration is just 30 minutes.

Kaus Manjita
Awesome. That's a, you know, for the listeners, a great walkthrough of, you know, how you're thinking about and implementing this today. And definitely father for Todd, I think overall for the marketplace economy, we can't run away from the fact that marketplaces have distribution. And so a bunch of our brands have to be on marketplaces. That's the reality at the moment. And we're very aware about that as a part of what we do too on an everyday basis, as a part of what I do every day. But just wondering like what would it take for the average consumer to adopt it? I think a lot of this distribution on marketplaces would be a great way for the average consumer to adopt it, right? But what do you think?

Kirti Poonia
I think we have to make it happen and definitely something that we would pursue as Rela.

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Kirti Poonia
I don't see it as something that will not happen. I see it as something that's going to happen. But you start small, you start somewhere, and the easiest place is brands that have the ethos, right? And then you build from there.

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Kaus Manjita
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that leads me now to the future question, right? Which I think that's a constant running through your mind. Like as I have 14 year old niece and nephew and they live abroad and you do see how my niece, for example, loves it. If I have like a, you know, one of my favorite t-shirts and I just wanted a couple of times and I'm with her and she's like, can I take it now that she can fit a little bit into stuff that I wear or my sister wears and stuff like that. But you can't run away from it. They're so woke and they're constantly talking about how what little can they do on an everyday, right? To actually make a little bit of impact on the future of our environment and our tiny blue dot. I think the concept of using and utilizing Reelove and integrating Reelove products across different categories into your day-to-day life is a great way to take that step every day. It's almost like something that you can do every single day.

Kaus Manjita
it feels like you've made an impact for sure, but actually do make an impact too, right? It's not like donating like $10 on an additional Starbucks coffee or whatever, Jim Horton's coffee or whatever that is. But what are your, what's your thesis and what some of your thoughts as you are, you are right there in the ground. I'm only talking from a hundred thousand people, but what are your thoughts? What are five years, 10 years? How do you, how do you paint a picture for us? Like how's the world changed?

Kirti Poonia
So, you know, when reviews started on Amazon, people started to buy if there was a review on the product. And that forced all other websites to actually have reviews before one purchases. And many small websites were not very keen on that, you know, they were like, but Amazon was like, no, let everyone read every good and bad review and make a decision.

I want to normalize resale, right? I want to normalize the fact that you should have a resale option where you buy that product from. And so how today reviews are just so normal, right? You need to have them. Reselling and a circular economy for every single product purchased in the world should be, you know, sort of, it should have a possibility of being resold.

Kaus Manjita
Hmm. Yeah, yeah. And it does make sense, right? Because let's say something can't be resold or is not possible to be resold. It tells you a little bit about what to expect in terms of just the material of the t-shirt or whatever else that you're trying to buy, right? I love the vision of how it's almost as equivalent to a review, or testimonials or whatever else and beds that you have on stores today, you don't even think about it. And it's all there. Love that, love that thought. And I wanna end with that thought. Thank you so much. Give me anything parting thoughts that you wanna tell entrepreneurs. We're starting in a slightly unusual or category building sort of segment. If you are in either building a brand, which is very different in a new category or you're building solutions for brands, which is again, a lot of it ends up being categorized. Any thoughts or takeaways for our listeners?

Kirti Poonia
Well, I think, you know, storytelling is so important. And that's what we're doing here, right? We're telling our story on this podcast. Often storytelling feels like there's no direct or no immediate result on it, right? But it ties into the long run and it ties into the whole brand, ties into what you're doing, your persona and how you can convince people.

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Kaus Manjita
Thank you so much for that. And we'll end on that note, folks. It was a lovely conversation. And I'm hoping that I can bring Kriti back again to discuss other things. She's also a new mother and kind of like doing two startups at the same time, a baby and her digital baby. So we'll definitely get her back on for another great conversation some other time. But thank you. And yeah, that's it from us.

Stay tuned for the next episode and we'll follow with the details next up.

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