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Appbrew Mobile Apps for DTC Brands
Building High Performance Mobile Apps for DTC Shopify Brands
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He left Silicon Valley to solve the hardest problem in Indian ecommerce.Kiran Kotla was a senior engineer at two unicorn...
06/02/2026

He left Silicon Valley to solve the hardest problem in Indian ecommerce.

Kiran Kotla was a senior engineer at two unicorn startups companies acquired by Cisco and Marvell.

He could have kept building.

Instead, he came back to solve something nobody else was willing to touch:

Getting Indian products to the world. Reliably. Legally. At scale.

Customs bills that nobody warned you about.
Shipments stuck with no explanation.
Regulations that exist on paper but work differently in practice.
40 different regulatory regimes across 40 countries.

This is the infrastructure problem every Indian brand hits the moment they try to go global — and almost no one is solving it properly.

Kiran is.

In this episode of Brewed, we go deep on:
→ Why cross-border commerce is fundamentally broken
→ What "distance commerce" actually means as a category
→ Why your domestic playbook will fail internationally
→ The compliance mistakes that can kill your brand overnight
→ What the world is actually buying from India right now
→ How Dista is becoming the operating system for Indian brands going global

If you're building an Indian brand with global ambitions this is required listening.

Full conversation on YouTube. Link in comments.

🎙️ Brewed Podcast | Kiran Kotla, Co-Founder & CEO, Dista

06/01/2026

The goal wasn’t simply to launch another mobile app. It was to rebuild the mobile experience around how beauty customers actually discover, evaluate, and purchase products.

The outcome:

→ 70% higher conversion compared to mobile web
→ 33% higher AOV compared to mobile web
→ 36% of total DTC revenue now coming from the app

What stood out during the process was that the challenge wasn't traffic.

It was experience.

SUGAR’s customer journey is heavily driven by content, bundles, recommendations, and offers. But those experiences weren’t translating effectively into their previous app.

So together, we reimagined the mobile experience.

A dedicated Offers section replaced promotional clutter. Shoppable video became part of product discovery. Bundles, combos, and curated kits were given the visibility they deserved. And the entire growth stack integrated seamlessly without compromising performance.

The broader lesson for DTC brands is simple:

If discovery and merchandising drive purchase decisions in your category, your app cannot be a smaller version of your website.

It needs to be purpose-built for how customers actually buy.

A huge thank you to the SUGAR Cosmetics team for trusting us with this journey.

Full case study in the comments.

05/25/2026

China built a $300B cross-border DTC ecosystem.
India still hasn’t produced a truly dominant export-first consumer brand at global scale.

Why?

In the latest episode of Brewed by Appbrew, Kiran Kotla, Co-Founder and CEO of Dista, breaks down the structural challenges Indian brands face when expanding internationally:

→ fragmented regulations
→ weak cross-border playbooks
→ localization gaps
→ payment and checkout friction
→ pricing strategies that hurt conversion

But beneath all of this, there’s a much bigger shift happening.

More than 30% of Distacart’s customers today are non-Indian origin.

That changes the conversation completely.

Global consumers are becoming increasingly open to Indian brands, as long as the product solves a genuine problem and fits naturally into their lives.

Customers care less about geography than relevance.

And while many brands continue fighting for short-term attention on web channels, Dista saw app contribution grow from 7% to 22% in just 9 months.

Because long-term retention is rarely built on rented platforms alone.

It’s built through owned customer relationships.

This conversation is a deep dive into how Indian brands should think about global commerce, localization, retention, and mobile-first growth in the years ahead.

🎧 Brewed featuring Kiran Kotla, Co-Founder and CEO of . Dropping soon.

How does a beauty brand turn mobile into its highest-converting channel?Most people knowSUGAR Cosmetics Cosmetics from ...
05/22/2026

How does a beauty brand turn mobile into its highest-converting channel?

Most people knowSUGAR Cosmetics Cosmetics from

But the more interesting story is what they built behind the scenes.

Founded by Vineeta Singh and Kaushik Mukherjee in 2012, SUGAR became one of India’s earliest digital-first beauty brands. Today, the brand has 50,000+ retail touchpoints across the country and a mobile app that has become one of its strongest growth channels.

The numbers tell the story:
→ 70% higher conversion
→ 33% higher AOV
→ 36% of total DTC revenue coming from the app

While many brands spread their DTC growth across paid ads, email, and SMS, SUGAR built a mobile experience strong enough to become a major revenue driver on its own.

After experimenting with another platform, they returned to Appbrew to rebuild the experience with performance at the center.

We broke down the full journey in our latest case study.

Link in comments.

05/20/2026

A/B testing is live on Appbrew.

Guessing what your users want is expensive. Knowing is a competitive advantage.

That's why we built A/B testing directly into Appbrew, so you can experiment with different versions of your app and let real user behavior decide what wins.

With A/B testing, brands can now:

→ Run experiments across different parts of the app
→ Compare how users actually interact with each variation
→ Make product and merchandising decisions backed by data instead of assumptions

We've packed enterprise-grade experimentation into an interface that doesn't require a data science degree to operate. Setting up a test, picking your variants, and reading the results is genuinely straightforward.

Stop shipping based on hunches. Start shipping based on evidence.

The best-performing apps are rarely built on opinions alone.
They improve through continuous experimentation.

Available now for Enterprise brands on Appbrew.

05/18/2026

A story that says everything about what brand love really looks like.

Sujata Biswas and Taniya Biswas, Co-founder of Suta, runs into Sonakshi Sinha's mother in a lift.

Sonakshi had worn Suta in Mission Mangal. Her mom had cut the tag off the saree and stuck it behind her phone.

The address was on it. She wanted to visit.
She walked through Suta's warehouse that same day.

This is the kind of moment no performance marketing budget can manufacture. It's what happens when a product becomes part of someone's life.

For every DTC founder reading this: your North Star isn't conversion rate. It's whether a customer would keep your tag behind their phone.

Build for that, and the rest follows. Repeat orders. Word of mouth. Bollywood walking into your warehouse.

🎧 Full conversation on Brewed by Appbrew, episode 5, with Sujata Biswas and Taniya Biswas Co-Founders of Suta.

05/17/2026

Karan Johar's team.
Anil Kapoor Productions.
Mani Ratnam Productions.
Kiara Advani in Lust Stories.

They all came to Suta. Without a single celebrity contract.
Sujata Biswas and Tanya Biswas Co-founder of Suta, breaks down how it happened.
The stylists kept walking into their garage (yes, the actual garage).

The validation came organically because the product spoke for itself: light, comfortable, beautifully made.
The lesson for DTC founders is bigger than Bollywood:
Be visible across platforms.
Talk about the product, not the brand.
Let quality become the marketing.

Suta didn't chase celebrity.
Celebrity came to them because they showed up consistently and made something genuinely worth wearing.

In an era of paid influence, organic credibility is the rarest growth lever left.
And it compounds.

🎧 Full episode on Brewed by Appbrew with Sujata Biswas and Taniya Biswas Co-Founders of Suta.

05/16/2026

Suta's app data tells a story every DTC founder should hear:
→ Order values are higher on app
→ Time spent on app is higher than web
→ Customers already know the product, so they navigate with intent

Sujata Biswas and Taniya Biswas Co-founders of Suta, puts it perfectly:
"The app isn't a place to just sell, sell, sell constantly. It's a place to give your most loyal customers something special. Because they have it on their phone. That's a privilege."

Here's the mindset shift: your mobile app users are not new shoppers. They are your highest-intent, highest-LTV cohort. The brands that win on mobile aren't the ones pushing harder. They're the ones rewarding deeper.

If your app is a copy of your website, you're leaving retention on the table.

Ask instead: what can my app do for my customers that my website never could?

🎧 Brewed by Appbrew, episode 5, with the Co-Founders of Suta.

05/14/2026

"Customers gave us a special space in their life. I don't want to misuse it."

This is how Sujata Biswas, Co-founder of Suta, thinks about push notifications. And it's the masterclass most DTC brands need.

Most brands treat push notifications like a free sales channel. Blast offers. Push discounts. Squeeze the funnel.
Suta does the opposite. They only send a push when there's a real announcement worth making. Something that adds value to the customer's day, not just the bottom line.
The result? Customers don't turn notifications off. They wait for them.
The unlock: push notifications are not a sales tool. They're a trust account. Every irrelevant push is a withdrawal. Every meaningful one is a deposit.
For Shopify and DTC brands building mobile apps, this is the difference between an opt-out and an open.
Send less. Mean more.
🎧 Full conversation on Brewed by Appbrew, episode 5, with Sujata Biswas & Taniya Biswas Co-Founders of Suta.

05/12/2026

When professors from SP Jain studied Suta, one question kept coming up:

"Why are customers spending so much time on your website? Shouldn't they shop and leave?"

Sujata Biswas, Co-founder of Suta, has a fascinating answer. Their customers don't just shop. They browse, they add, they linger. The store is a destination, not a transaction.

That single insight is exactly why Suta didn't think twice about launching a mobile app.

Here's the truth most Shopify brands miss: high dwell time is a signal, not a glitch. It tells you customers want a deeper relationship with your brand. And the mobile app is built for exactly that kind of relationship.

Low bounce rates + high session times = your audience is ready for an app.

If your customers are treating your store like a place to belong, a mobile app turns that affinity into retention, repeat orders, and lifetime value.

What's your store's average session duration telling you?

🎧 Full episode of Brewed by Appbrew with Sujata Biswas & Tanya Biswas, Co-Founders of Suta, live on YouTube

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