Cross-border luxury e-commerce, built from zero
● The live platform — qala.global ↗I co-founded Qala and built a cross-border luxury platform for Indian designer and craft brands from nothing — the digital merchandising, 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 ready for international buyers
- Brands weren't ready for international buyers. 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.
- Luxury Shopify site — 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 house sites (Chanel, Gucci, Prada) and high-end marketplaces.
- 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 into Phase 2 (Qriti) rather than keep scaling the original thesis — choosing the truer problem over the easier story.