With 27 million online shoppers, India has the second-largest digital customer base in the world. By 2030, its e-retail market is expected to reach as high as $190 billion. Alongside rapid digitization, this tremendous growth is creating an entirely new category of online-first brands that are purpose-driven and built for today’s digitally-native consumer.

Building Brands for Purpose-Driven Consumers

Meolaa began as a marketplace for clean and sustainable products, quickly scaling to a customer base of more than 600,000. But founder Ishita Sawant recognized a fundamental problem in the consumer ecosystem: there simply wasn’t enough supply of the kinds of clean, sustainable brands Indian consumers are seeking. The solution? Build these brands in-house.  Meolaa plans to develop a portfolio of purpose-driven, digital-first microbrands fueled by a shared platform supporting cross-brand innovation, supply chain resilience, and marketing.

Meolaa is starting with the beauty and personal care (BPC) market, one of India’s fastest-growing sectors. Their debut brand, Hira, has scaled quickly by combining accessible pricing with creative product features, including a dessert-inspired fragrance. They now plan to expand into multiple market segments within consumer BPC, with a core focus on product innovation that has already set them apart from industry incumbents.

Ishita’s consumer-first mindset drives Meolaa’s core focus on creative product innovation. Combined with her experience driving global brand growth at Wayfair, she is leading a team that is passionate about building a new generation of brands that speak directly to India’s shifting consumer expectations.

Our Conversation with Ishita

We recently sat down with Ishita to talk about her inspiration behind Meolaa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What is clear to you about the evolving brand expectations of Indian consumers that may not be obvious to others?

The most powerful truth about India’s consumer evolution is that people are no longer engaging with brands as passive buyers. They see themselves as participants in the stories brands tell and the identities they represent. Gen Z and young millennials want to engage as co-creators. This shift is reshaping expectations across every stage of the consumer journey, yet it remains underrecognized by many legacy players that still operate within outdated category norms.

A defining change is the demand for extreme personalization at scale. Indian consumers expect brands to reflect who they are, where they come from, and what they aspire to become. Inclusivity in skin tone and hair texture, sensitivity to regional cultural nuances, and hyper-targeted storytelling for tier 2 and tier 3 markets are now fundamental. A brand that understands and responds to these signals earns lasting resonance. Authenticity has replaced aspiration as the driver of credibility—integrity is more persuasive than image. 

Consumers are less focused on features and more on the results they enable. The future of Indian consumption belongs to brands that serve as identity mirrors.

Your ambition is to support multiple brands in the Meolaa portfolio. How are you approaching early capability-building to support this future vision?

At Meolaa, we believe the future of consumer brands will be shaped by platforms that combine scale, speed, and precision. Our ambition to build and manage a portfolio of brands rests on creating a horizontally scalable FMCG [fast-moving consumer goods] engine that is repeatable, modular, and powered by technology. This approach ensures that every brand we launch is supported by shared capabilities while retaining its distinct identity.

The first step is codifying the flow from consumer market intelligence to new product development to go-to-market into software. We are building a consumer insights platform that synthesizes data from social channels, ecommerce, surveys, and search. A new product development chassis converts validated insights into structured product blueprints. A brand creation engine leverages design systems and AI-generated content, and a go-to-market operating system manages performance, inventory, and community engagement.

AI integration further strengthens this engine. We operate with a single-brand-manager model by deploying AI agents across insights, content, operations, and performance. Each brand, while expressing unique products and storytelling, is built on shared infrastructure, marketing playbooks, and creator feedback loops. This reduces team size, accelerates time to market, and lowers the burn rate per launch, enabling us to manage 10 to 20 brands with a lean structure.

This transformation presents massive opportunities for a new generation of consumer companies that understand the twin accelerants of purpose and innovation. That’s why we’re leading the seed round for Meolaa, a company reimagining what it means to build consumer brands for modern India.

Consumer and market intelligence forms the linchpin of execution. Continuous feedback loops inform every decision, ensuring that data translates into actionable insight. At the same time, manual scaling of creative processes impedes both speed and innovation. AI-powered content systems, standardized templates, and programmable branding preserve emotional depth while enabling rapid iteration. Iterative launches, lo-fi testing, and early co-creation with consumers accelerate learning and refinement.

Execution is about building resilient systems, harnessing insight continuously, and creating brands that resonate, evolve, and scale in a landscape where consumers define the narrative. At Meolaa, it rests on discipline, systems, and a deep understanding of the modern Indian consumer.