The Infinite Product 

New-age D2C brands, with their millennial-pandering marketing and Instagram aesthetics, occupy a peculiar space in India’s collective consumer psyche. They are, in a sense, avatars of a distinctly post-liberalisation aspiration—brands that feel global but carry just enough local varnish to make them palatable to a market that still bristles, albeit inconsistently, at the spectre of foreign dominance. They are the quintessential chai latte: ostensibly Indian in spirit, but wearing an imported aesthetic like a carefully draped pashmina.

Mokobara, a Bengaluru-based luggage brand, was recently accused of sourcing generic designs from Chinese manufacturers and selling them at premium prices in India without owning any intellectual property rights. The controversy ignited when influencers noted similarities between Mokobara’s products and those available on other e-commerce platforms at significantly lower prices. Mokobara addressed the allegations with a bold marketing move, offering a 10 per cent discount code named “WHITELABEL” and asserting their commitment to creating “originals worth imitating”. It has since come to be known that Mokobara indeed owns the intellectual property rights to its designs.

Similarly, boAt, a well-known Indian consumer electronics brand, has faced scrutiny for its business practices. Allegations have surfaced accusing boAt of importing products from Chinese manufacturers and rebranding them for the Indian market, raising questions about the brand’s commitment to originality and domestic manufacturing. The company has clarified that 75 per cent of its manufacturing happens in India. “As we mark this Republic Day, we take immense pride in our journey—proving that a global vision can stem from Indian soil. We’re now not just made in India; we’re made for India, now ready for the world,” said Aman Gupta, Co-founder & CMO, boAt, in a statement.

These incidents highlight the complex dynamics of the D2C market in India, where the balance between global sourcing and brand authenticity continues to be a contentious issue. But what makes this space so fertile for controversy—and also so immune to real consequences—is the tension between the marketed image and the unsexy mechanics of production. On the one hand, the consumer is complicit in the fiction—after all, no one buying a pair of earphones or a premium suitcase really believes they are acquiring something made by hand in a workshop in Jaipur. On the other hand, the revelation of white labelling feels like a betrayal, an exposure of the fragile scaffolding of authenticity upon which many D2C brands perch. This is the outrage of the modern Indian consumer: not anger at being deceived, but irritation at having the deception so clumsily revealed.

And yet, paradoxically (or perhaps inevitably), this outrage resolves itself not in rejection but in a kind of resigned acceptance. The consumer keeps buying the product, keeps clicking “Add to Cart”, because the alternative—engaging with the terrifyingly complex global supply chains and structural inequalities that make white labelling possible—feels too overwhelming.

To talk about white labelling in India is to begin not with the thing itself but with its shadows, the moral and philosophical fissures it reveals in the socio-economic edifice. The practice is everywhere and nowhere: one company manufactures LED bulbs in a nondescript Noida factory, while five others, separated only by the logos they affix, claim ownership of said bulbs with varying degrees of pomp. Milk packets, bottled water, biscuits, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, apparel and accessories—what isn’t white labelled? The quintessentially modern art of rebranding someone else’s product as one’s own is less a trend than a silent protagonist of capitalism’s global story. And in India—a country forever at the intersection of ancient craft and post-industrial hypermodernity—it has birthed a series of controversies around a practice that has in fact existed for decades.

Consider the coir mats of Kerala or the block-printed textiles of Rajasthan, which were, for centuries, produced by artisans and then rebranded by traders, zamindars, and, later, colonial overlords. There was no pretense of attribution here; the weaver and the dyer remained invisible, their names drowned in the glow of the merchant’s seal. This early analogue of whitelabelling wasn’t controversial because it wasn’t yet seen as deception. Instead, it was merely a byproduct of a caste-based, hierarchically ordained division of labour. The controversy, as such, would only emerge later, in the age of brands and the great chimera of self-made success.

Post liberalisation, white labelling surged, not as a shadowy side industry but as a logical corollary of the “Make in India” ethos before it even had a name. Small manufacturers, especially those in the informal sector, found themselves courted by big brands who offered volume in exchange for anonymity. But with this expansion came a peculiar existential crisis. The controversies of this period weren’t about the ethics of white labelling per se but about its effects on the Indian entrepreneurial psyche. Wasn’t this just another form of colonial subjugation, albeit with a corporate veneer? When a homegrown detergent manufacturer in Gujarat signed a contract to produce for an American giant, was it selling out—or levelling up?

The arrival of Amazon, Flipkart, and their ilk in the early 2010s took white labelling out of the back alleys of industrial parks and into the public eye. Suddenly, consumers realised that many “brands” on these platforms were nothing more than relabelled products churned out by the same factories. In the current moment, white labelling in India occupies a curious double-bind. On the one hand, it’s a driver of economic efficiency, enabling small manufacturers to scale up and big brands to diversify. On the other hand, it perpetuates a kind of epistemic opacity, a refusal to let consumers see the hands that make the products they buy. This opacity has led to newer controversies, particularly in industries like pharmaceuticals and food, where questions of safety and accountability take on life-or-death stakes.

AmazonbrandingFlipkartlabellingmanufacturingproductsrebranding