Over Rs 1.2 crore monthly revenue, customers across 388 cities: The Better Home is the first D2C brand to nail the “Community to Subscription Commerce” model in India

 

The Better India, with an online community of over 90 Million, launched their subscription home care brand of eco-friendly cleaners The Better Home six months ago

·         The Subscription Commerce model built on top of a community business is what industry experts call “the Holy Grail”, but few in the country have been able to execute this at scale

·         Founders Dhimant & Anuradha Parekh attribute this success to the brand trust and loyalty they have built over the past decade with The Better India community

·         The Better Home, India’s very first Direct to Consumer enterprise of eco-friendly, naturally derived home cleaners, saved 130 million litres of contaminated water from waterbodies, and 162K plastic bottles from landfills within a span of 6 months.

New Delhi, Dec 2020: With a monthly revenue of over Rs 1.2 crore and a reach spanning 388 cities, India’s very first Direct to Consumer enterprise of eco-friendly home cleaners, the Better Home (https://www.thebetterindia.com/)  has become one of the first brands to have successfully established the “Community to Subscription Commerce” model in the Indian market. The landmark success, built on a strong base of over 90 million readers has been achieved within six months of the launch of its naturally derived cleaning products.

The subscription-based consumer brand generated a revenue of 1.2 crores last month and has grown by 10 times since it just started off.

Incepted by the founders of award-winning content platform The Better India, it has scripted an unprecedented D2C subscription model success and is seeing its community of over 90 million readers respond and accept the new consumer brand enthusiastically. The Better Home is built on the belief that you should not have to choose between what's effective, what's good for you, and what's good for the planet!

Contrary to the belief that newer concepts, like eco-friendly products, are popular only in Tier 1 cities, The Better Home has served consumers in over 388 cities across the country. The environmental impact of its products is already showing: The Better Home users have saved 130 million litres (that’s 45 Olympic sized pools worth) of contaminated water from entering our waterbodies, and 162K plastic bottles from being dumped in our landfills in a span of 6 months.

Explaining why they forayed into FMCG products, a sector so different from digital content, Dhimant Parekh, Founder & CEO, The Better Home, says, “The heart of it is really the same. Large scale positive impact is the reason we built The Better India, and the same reason we built The Better Home. Over the last few years, we saw reader interest in our content around environmental activism and sustainability peak, and we had readers writing in about how they struggled to find sustainable alternatives to daily use products! We were simply responding to their needs and saw this as a great opportunity to enable and empower them to make better consumption choices.”

Although Community to Commerce and Subscription is considered the “holy grail” for brands across the globe, very few players in the online community space have successfully created consumer products of their own. Internationally, FMCG Giant Procter & Gamble has taken a very similar route with their launch of eco-friendly home care products called Home Made Simple 15 years ago.

The community approach is extended to The Better Home – every user becomes a part of #TheBetterHomies, a sustainability forum that gets exclusive access to expert webinars, DIY tips and participates in conversations with the brand and its users around sustainability. “TheBetterHomies community inspires us every day to keep building, and bettering our product offering. It is like the Quora for sustainability in India – everyday they discuss practical ways of adopting healthier and more sustainable lifestyles. In fact, we are organizing a meet up for those in the same city,” co-founder Anuradha Parekh says.

From a business standpoint, the subscription model is a sure shot path to success, given the cost of acquiring a customer is only a small fraction of the customer’s contribution to revenue over time. Although subscription commerce has picked up in India in the entertainment and media space, it is not as commonplace in CPG products. However, at The Better Home, over 75% customers choose to subscribe to the product, instead of buying it just once. What makes them different?

“It’s not the model in itself, but ties back into 10 years of hard work from building a meaningful online community and trusted brand – The Better India. From customer insights, we understand that they subscribe in the first go because of their belief in the brand’s purpose. About 88% of our customers hail from our TBI community and aren’t just customers of the brand, but go on to become brand ambassadors because of the trust we’ve built over the years with them,” co-founder Anuradha Parekh says.