Cross-border B2B platform, built from zero
● The live platform — qala.global ↗I co-founded Qala and built a cross-border wholesale platform for Indian craft from nothing — the storefront, the supply pipeline, and the pricing that let margin survive the journey. Buyers came back.
The result
One star, two systems
The problem
Craft, not wholesale-ready
- Brands weren't wholesale-ready. No standardized international pricing, no structured onboarding — beautiful product that couldn't be ordered at scale.
- Wrong buyer journey. Product-led browsing, when boutique buyers actually shop by collection and story.
- No cross-border margin safety. No landed-cost model to keep an order profitable across shipping, duty and currency.
What I built
Two systems
1 · Collection-led platform
Shop the way buyers actually buy.
- Shopify B2B storefront — parent-child collection architecture (occasion × season), brand store pages, multi-wishlist and enquiry flows.
- Product spec end-to-end — wireframes, interaction design, UX benchmarks drawn from luxury sourcing platforms.
- 600+ products, 31 brands live across 30+ boutiques in the US and UK.
2 · Supply readiness & DDP pricing
Make margin survive the border.
- 350+ brand pipeline with 14-parameter weighted scoring and a 30+ checkpoint readiness tracker.
- DDP-first landed-cost pricing — MRP → bulk discount → commission → forwarding → DDP → RRP, so margin held across the journey.
Artifact · DDP pricing waterfall
MRP (India)₹5,990
− bulk discount & commissionadjust
+ forwarding, duty, DDPlanded
RRP (US/UK)$270
The outcome
Buyers came back, and the round closed
- Star — ~79% repeat buyer rate across 30 boutiques over two seasons, the clearest proof the product worked.
- ₹75L pre-seed raised on the strength of the traction.
- 600+ products live across the platform; 350+ brand pipeline built and scored.
- Deliberate exit, Jun 2026 — I stepped away; the company continues to operate.
The judgment call: when field discovery showed the real bottleneck was production-readiness, not sourcing, I led the pivot toward Qriti rather than keep scaling the original thesis — choosing the truer problem over the easier story.