Consulting · D2C footwear · Mumbai
Built for six people. Still running at fifty-six.
The short version
In 2019 The CAI Store was six people, and most of how the company actually worked lived in the founders’ heads. We wrote the roles, documented and re-engineered the processes, built an eighteen-month plan with the manpower to staff it, and recommended the business diversify beyond its core category. Heels launched within months and became a substantial share of sales. Three years later the founders brought us back for a different problem — the economics of their website — and we advised their internal team and external agency through a year of it. The structures from 2019 are still the ones the company runs on.
Structure before the growth, not after it
The CAI Store had found something that worked. Launched in 2015 selling non-leather footwear online, it had grown to the point where a great deal of how the business ran — the judgement calls, the exceptions, the reasons things were done a particular way — sat with Aradhana and Dhanraj Minawala rather than on paper. That is the normal condition of a founder-led company that has grown quickly, and it works until it doesn’t.
They were not asking us to fix a broken business. They were asking for the opposite to put the structure in place before the growth arrived, while the company was still small enough to describe properly. That is an unusual brief to receive and a good reason to take a client seriously.
The best time to write down how a company works is while it is still simple enough to write down. Most businesses get to it much later, when the structure ends up built around whoever happens to be firefighting that quarter.
Asking both sides of every role
The method matters more than the deliverables here, because it is what made the deliverables correct.
We started with management, working through every role in the business and what they expected from it. Then we went to the people actually doing those jobs and asked them the same questions — what they understood the role to be, and what got in the way of doing it.
The gap between the two answers is diagnostic. Where management and the individual described the role differently, that was a communication gap. Where they agreed on the role but the person could not deliver it, a capability gap. Where they agreed and the person could but did not, an intent gap. Three different problems that look identical from the outside, and that have completely different solutions.
We then bucketed everything found into strategic, operational and people issues, and split those again between problems holding growth back and problems created by the absence of structure. Without that separation you end up writing process documents for what is actually a hiring problem.
What we built
Item four is the one most structuring exercises skip, and it is the reason these documents were still in use six years later. A process written for someone is complied with until nobody is watching. A process writtenwiththem tends to survive.
What happened in between
They launched heels within a few months of the recommendation. The category went on to become a substantial part of the business — the client puts it above 40% of sales. The diversification has continued since into bags, totes and sneakers.
In June 2022 The CAI Store opened its first physical store at Phoenix Palladium in Lower Parel, having shelved an earlier attempt when the pandemic hit. Stores in Thane and Ahmedabad followed. Collaborations with Rhea Kapoor and Aashna Shroff took the brand into an audience it had not previously reached.
None of that is our work. It is what the founders were able to turn their attention to once the running of the business no longer needed all of it.
A different problem, three years later
The founders came back with a sharper question. The website was the business’s most important channel and they wanted substantially more revenue out of it — but they needed a model for performance marketing and demand planning, not more spending.
This was an advisory engagement.The campaigns were run by their internal team and an external agency. Our role was to work out what the data said, decide what should change, and drive both teams to execute it. We did not touch the ad accounts.
We went function by function — performance marketing, social, retention, website product placement, demand planning — and analysed the data behind each. Everything found was sorted into strategic changes and efficiency improvements, then sequenced: performance marketing first, then website positioning, then demand planning, with retention capability built alongside.
What it produced
What we can and cannot tell you
We did not have access to their financial systems. Consulting engagements rarely come with the client’s internal performance data, and this one did not. The revenue and budget movements above are the client’s figures, given to us during the engagement. We can tell you what we recommended, what was implemented and what the client reported. We cannot audit it, and we are not going to present it as though we had.
The targets were not met. Cost of acquisition and return on ad spend both finished within 5% of target, which is close, and close is not the same as achieved. A page that reports the 40% and omits this is not worth reading.
We did not run the campaigns. An internal team and an external agency did. Our contribution was the analysis, the decisions and the pressure to implement them — which is a different kind of work and a fair thing to be sceptical about. The evidence that it was worth something is that the client had run the same channel with the same agency the year before.
The company’s growth is not our claim. The revenue figures on this page are public record and they cover a period far longer than our involvement. A business grows for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with its consultants. What we can point at is narrower and is set out below.
Seven years on
Most companies rebuild their systems at every threshold. The org design that worked at ten people fails at forty, the processes written for one channel break when a second opens, and somebody is brought in to start again.
That has not happened here. The job descriptions, process flows, checklists and manpower planning built in 2019 were extended during the 2022 engagement to cover new functions. They were not replaced.
This is the claim we would defend, and it is deliberately narrow. We are not saying we grew this company sevenfold. We are saying the structure we built when it was six people is still the structure it runs on at fifty-six, through three retail openings and four new categories — and that it was extended rather than thrown away.
Constraints that shaped the work
The first engagement closed in March 2020, which turned out to be the worst possible month to hand a retail business an eighteen-month plan. The plan assumed a world that stopped existing within weeks of delivery. The structural work — roles, processes, checklists — held up because it was about how the company operated rather than what the market was doing. The forecasting did not.
In the second engagement we were advising rather than executing, which caps what can be promised. Every recommendation had to be understood, accepted and implemented by two teams we did not manage, and some of it moved slower than it should have. That is the honest cost of an advisory model, and it is why the targets were approached rather than hit.
In their words
“Debox is very methodical in their ways. They not only understand the needs of the company but they take time and effort to speak to each employee and understand their needs and incorporate it within the work structure. Their re-structuring has already sorted our company in so many ways which has helped our business grow only because we have gotten structured so fast.”
Aradhana Minawala — Co-Founder, The CAI Store
If your company runs on what you know
The right time to write down how a company works is before it needs to scale, not after it has struggled to. Structure built under pressure tends to get built around whoever is firefighting at the time.
And build it with the people who will use it, not for them. That single difference is why documents written for a six-person company were still being used by a fifty-six-person one.
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Every figure sourced from the client’s own systems, with the basis stated and the exclusions named.Advik Hi-Tech
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Measurement note. Revenue figures for FY2019–20 and FY2024–25 are drawn from public reporting and third-party company records rather than from the client. Team size at each engagement is from our own project records; the current figure is the company’s own published headcount. Website revenue, budget and inventory movements for 2022–23 are client-reported figures given to us during the engagement and were not independently audited by us. Category share is client-reported.
