Salteen
A Banarasi pickle and namkeen brand built from nothing: trademark, domain, store, marketplaces, ads, profit.
Brand built from scratch
From registration to profitable
The problem
Everything, and a fixed budget. No brand, no trademark, no store, no product photography, no reviews. Plus the specific problems of a food D2C brand in India: FSSAI compliance, shipping costs that dwarf product price on single-unit orders, and national competitors who already own the generic category keywords.
What we did
- Trademark filing, domain, hosting and Cloudflare before a line of code
- WooCommerce storefront rather than Shopify, a deliberate cost decision
- Fastrr by Shiprocket for checkout, chosen over GoKwik because it carries no fixed monthly fee
- Google Merchant Center setup, and resolution of a return policy rejection
- Regional SEO targeting Banarasi and UP-origin terms rather than competing nationally
- Listings and advertising on Amazon and Flipkart
- Meta campaigns, and diagnosis of a shipping-charge conversion leak at checkout
The outcome
Two decisions kept the launch affordable enough to reach profit: WooCommerce instead of Shopify, and a checkout that charges per transaction instead of a monthly licence. Both are worse on features than the alternatives, and both were right for a brand with no revenue yet. The single largest conversion gain came from removing a shipping charge that only appeared at the final checkout step on single-jar orders.
Want results like this?
Tell us about your business. We will reply on WhatsApp with an honest first read on what we would do.