Daybreak - Decathlon is testing if fashion can learn to move at grocery quick-commerce speed

Episode Date: February 8, 2026

In November, Decathlon began piloting two-hour deliveries across 10 Indian cities.It's a surprising move for a company that just swung into losses—and it raises a question the rest of the sector is watching closely: can the economics of fashion quick-commerce actually work?More than 50 million dollars has flowed into the space in 18 months. At least one startup has already shut down. The problem isn't speed. It's frequency, inventory, and unit economics that refuse to close.Tune in.If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [e-mail] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories. 

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first studio recording, episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. It's 9pm on a weekday in Bangal's Indranagar. Ria Garwal needs a blazer. Her current one is stained and the IT consultant has a client meeting the next morning. The mall is an hour away because of the famed Bangalore traffic.

Regular e-commerce promises delivery by Friday, which is useless to her. So she opens Slick, which is one of those few apps that now offers fashion at quick commerce speed. Three blazers arrive in 40 minutes. Ria tries them on while the delivery partner waits outside her door. She keeps one, returns to. This kind of try and buy is no longer unusual. In some apartment complexes, the riders wait in corridors or parking lots, and in others, security cards time the exchange themselves.

You might have seen ads for apps like Slick, Mintras Mnow and New Me Zip. All of them rely on this exact model. Customers order multiple sizes or styles and return what doesn't work for them. But as convenience rises, so do costs. For example, a rider who waits outside flats is going to complete fewer. deliveries every day. Stories like Riyas are usually meant to celebrate convenience. But something has changed, and that is the kind of company that's willing to absorb this friction.

In November last year, Decathlon began piloting two-hour deliveries across 10 Indian cities. The move followed a smaller experiment through Blinket in 2024. This time, Decathlon is building quick commerce into its own channels. This choice carries weight because decathlon isn't a newcomer that's testing ideas for attention. It's a French company, but its India business has been built over a decade, with more than 100 stores, private labels, local manufacturing and tight control overpricing. In the last fiscal year alone, India revenues grew by 3% to just over 4,100 crore rupees, but profits swung into a 65 crore-rupy loss.

With less room for indulgent experiments now, DeCathlon's decision to push two-hour delivery has drawn notice. See, if a French sportswear giant is willing to attempt this experiment at scale, it suggests that the economics might actually work, even under inventory pressure and last mile costs. The rest of the sector is still looking for the proof that the test works, and Decathlon may have an answer. The competition in this space is picking up speed. Over the last 18 months, Akshah Gulati, the founder and CEO of Slick, says that more than $50 million has flowed into fashion quick commerce. And at least one early entrant has already shut down.

The GEN spoke to a retail manufacturer who told us that 100 to 500 orders a day may look fine in the beginning. But the real test is what happens when the numbers need to cross a thousand. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Risha. River Guise and every day of the week, my co-host, Nikasharman and I will bring you one new story that is worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Monday, the 9th of February.

DeKathlons move into two-hour delivery targets an old frustration in fashion e-commerce. Returns. That's right. Every time you try something out from Mindra, only to realize that it's not quite right and hit that return button, that is the bane of fashion e-commerce's existence. Online fashion in India had grown into a $21 billion market last year. But scale arrived faster than profitability. An e-commerce analyst told the can that return rates often hit 30% to 45%, which keeps margins under pressure.

Now, speed appeared to offer a fix there. Deliver faster and customers are more likely to be home. Fewer misdelivories means fewer returns. Sumit Jasoria is the co-founder of, of New Me, a fast fashion brand that introduced 60-minute delivery in late 2023. He told us that there are two reasons why customers return products. One is issues with design or size. The second is because the customer isn't available when the order arrives.

He said that faster delivery reduces the second category by over 15%. Now, Tess in Delhi have shown encouraging results with better conversion rates and lower returns. This model is borrowing a page from the Grocery Quick Commerce book. If you compress delivery times, you can watch frictions fall away. But fashion doesn't move like groceries. Think about it. The milk and eggs you get every day or every other day are unlikely to change overnight. Grocery demand is, by its nature, repetitive,

which makes it easier to forecast inventory with reasonable accuracy and density builds naturally. Fashion, on the other hand, is irratory. An e-commerce analyst tracking the sector said that demand is not consistent in fashion. It's periodic. It may be good on weekends and on weekdays not so much. Also, seasonal shifts make it difficult to trap. That unpredictability makes itself known throughout the unit economics. For example, Blinkets Dark Stores need roughly 1,800 orders a day just to break even. Newme averages about 170 orders daily. To break even, it needs 600 to 800. Blip, which was an early player, struggled to cross 100 orders per dark store before it finally shut down in 2025. Sources said that it was burning 100 rupees for every 10 rupees in revenue. Even at a larger scale, contribution remains modest. Mintra's M now runs more than 80 dark stores across seven cities. It accounts for only about 8% of the company's revenue. Frequency sits at the center of the problem.

Grocery customers order daily or weekly. Fashion customers order two or three times a month at most. Order values are higher, about 1500 rupees for Nomi and 2,700 for slick. But volume still remains thin. And of course, styles also age with time. A retail manufacturer told the ken that unlike chips or ice cream, fashion isn't an impulse purchase. It's need-based. So this is what DeKathlon is what DeKathlon.

is stepping into, a space where speed fixes a narrow problem but leaves harder ones untouched. More on this in the next segment. Decaathlon's decision to build its own quick delivery channel is about control over inventory. A grocery operation can stock one brand of milk in two sizes and that covers most of the demand. Fashion of course requires far more variation. Multiple sizes from S to double XL, styles, colors, brands, all of those factors have to be guessed at in advance, down to the pin code. Even brands specifically designed for speed hit limits.

New Me, which sells only its own labels, uses data from its main e-commerce business to predict demand by neighborhood. Top-selling products are pushed to specific dark stores and replenished within 24 hours. Despite that, its quick commerce arm carries only about 1,500 styles. The main website lists nearly 18,000. That gap exists because speed and selection inherently pulled in opposite directions. The tighter the catalogue, the easier it is to manage inventory and costs. Some companies have tried to bridge the gap through try and buy, like we saw in Ria's case. Customers order multiple sizes, try them at the door, keep what works and return the rest.

Under this model, Slick's founders say that average order values rise to 2,000. 700 rupees from 1,200. But a delivery partner handling try and buy completes only 6 to 8 orders a day, which effectively doubles last mile costs and accelerates cash burn. This makes inventory planning harder. A quick commerce analyst said that brands cannot replicate the dense dark store networks built by grocery platforms such as Blinket or Zepto, because demand at a pincode level is too difficult to predict. Slick, for example, operates four dark stores in Bangalore, each about 10,000 square feet big. Marketplace economics adds more treasure. Sources say that platforms like Mintra charge brands commissions of 25 to 30%. For retailers with thin margins, that's

actually reason enough to build their own channels. Still, what sells fastest is rarely expressive fashion. Subin Mithra, founder of Droyo, which manufactured. For manufacturers for brands like Mango and Zara said that much of what moves is surplus stock, basic t-shirts, jeans, shorts, the like. Plus, discounts of 60 to 70% on these products are common, with brands absorbing the loss to clear inventory. Not every brand leans on try and buy. Numi uses QuickCommerce as a feedback loop.

Faster returns translate into clearer demand signals and quick adjustments are made on the production side. In Bangalore, quick commerce contributes about 17% of their orders. Still, the constraints remain. Fashion quick commerce moves what's already made and stocked. It does not shorten the distance between an idea and a product. Speed ends at the warehouse door. Statling

If Blinket, Septo and Swiggy already have the capital, warehouses and riders, why haven't they taken over fashion? The answer begins with behavior. Josoria of Newmey said that in India, people don't buy clothing from where they buy groceries. Take Demart, for example. Despite having more than 350 stores, it derives less than 20% of its revenue from fashion. Operations only reinforce that divide. See, grocery platforms are optimized for goods that fly off shells quickly.

Fashion sits on shelves longer, which ties up space that could generate high-frequency grocery sales. And well, that space is expensive. Darkstore rent can account for up to 15% of revenue. The analyst we mentioned earlier told us that fashion contributes to less than 5% of blanket sales. It only spikes briefly during festivals before fading out again. What works on grocery platforms is narrow and functional. Basic athletic wares, sport socks, underwear. Droyo's Mitra told us that it's all need-based.

When you're running out of socks, your concern is in style. It's whether you have them or not. Basically, all you care about is that you have a pair of socks to wear to office the next day. That's why vertical players argue that they have an edge. Gulati of Slick told us that grocery first companies can't turn fashion into their DNA. Depth of curation, which is fits, colors, brands, patterns, requires a different operating logic itself. Slick runs four dark stores in Bangalore and claims significantly higher order density per store than Mintra's M now, which operates a wider but thinner network. Even so, the ceiling is very visible. The total addressable market for fashion quick commerce is estimated at 5% of online fashion, concentrated in 8 metro cities.

Most players remain geographically constrained. Numi operates only in Delhi and Bangalore. Slick is limited to Bangalore. Not still operates only in Mumbai. Even on peak days, orders stay close to a few hundred. And scaling beyond two to three cities is an unproven experiment altogether. In comparison, DeCathlon's approach looks measured and not very ambitious. It tested quick delivery through Blinket, then brought it in-house. Like Mintra and Yumi, it treats speed as an add-on rather than the base business model.

Stand-alone ventures by contrast must overcome low frequency, complex inventory, cultural resistance and economics that refuse to close without scale. The thing is, fashion may have learned to be fast. But it still hasn't learned to be frequent. When asked if she'd use slick regularly, Maria paused. Maybe for special locations, she said. For regular shopping, she'd rather plan instead. For an industry built on urgency, that hesitation, may be the hardest thing to deliver around.

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and edited by Rajiv Sien.