Cosco India — Launching a legacy sports brand into D2C

The context

Cosco is one of India’s most recognised sports equipment brands — decades of distribution, deep retail presence, and a generation of Indian athletes who grew up with Cosco balls, bats, and nets. What it did not have until recently was a D2C surface: a direct storefront where customers could buy from the brand, not a reseller.

I worked with the Cosco team as a consultant on the launch of store.cosco.in — the brand’s direct-to-consumer storefront.

What I worked on

• D2C positioning. Shaping how a legacy, trust-heavy brand should speak to a customer buying directly online — balancing the equity of the offline brand with the expectations of a modern e-commerce experience.
• Launch go-to-market. Structuring the launch plan across performance marketing, brand, and owned channels — with a phasing that protected the existing reseller ecosystem while opening a new direct revenue line.
• Growth foundations. Advising on the foundational growth stack — analytics, attribution, lifecycle tooling, and the operating cadence needed to run a D2C business at scale.
• Category and creative direction. Helping translate Cosco’s deep category expertise (cricket, football, fitness, racquet sports) into distinct storefront experiences and creative pillars.

What I learned

Legacy brand equity is an asset, not a handicap. The temptation in every D2C launch for a heritage brand is to reinvent the brand to “feel digital.” That is usually wrong. The equity is the moat — the storefront needs to lean into it, not around it.

D2C for heritage brands is a distribution question, not a marketing question. The hard part of launching Cosco’s D2C was not creative or ads — it was the thinking around how the direct channel coexists with decades of offline distribution without cannibalising partners. Most of the strategic work was here.

Category-first storefronts beat generic catalogue storefronts. A customer buying a cricket bat is not in the same shopping mindset as a customer buying a treadmill. Structuring the storefront around category experiences rather than a single generic catalogue produces measurably better conversion.

Why this matters for how I work now

Cosco was one of my earliest advisory engagements, and it was the one that taught me that most D2C growth advice — even the very good advice — is written for tech-first brands and breaks on contact with heritage brands. The rules are different. The rhythms are different. The risk surface is different.

That lesson has shaped every engagement I have taken on since. It also shaped what Grovio Labs needs to be: an autonomous marketing system that holds brand memory for a 50-year-old brand as fluently as it holds memory for a 50-day-old one. The heritage is context, not friction — and the system has to treat it that way.