This mysterious D2C brand is bootstrapped and profitable

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Hello reader,

Everyone loves a good mystery, me included. Growing up, I was a connoisseur of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and I devoured all of Agatha Christie’s work as a young teen.

Today’s premium story has a bit of mystery in it. My colleague Melissa spoke with Sant Qiu, the founder of Maneuver Marketing. He built a direct-to-consumer (D2C) brand that has raked in US$340 million in sales since it launched in 2018, without any VC backing.

However, while I know the firm sells health supplements through online channels like Shopify and Amazon, I’ve got no idea what brand exactly this is, because Qiu specifically asked Tech in Asia not to disclose its name in this story.

I can try asking Melissa very nicely if she’d be willing to let me in on this secret, but the rest of you will probably have to live with the mystery for a while longer.

Fortunately, Qiu was willing to talk about how this business got so successful, and that’s honestly a lot more interesting.

Today we look at:

• This mysterious nine-figure D2C brand
• JD.com’s earnings in the second quarter of 2023
• Other newsy highlights such as GoTo’s profitability strategy and Sea’s plans to focus on Shopee

Premium summary

How this secretive D2C brand has thrived

Image credit: Timmy Loen

All we know about Sant Qiu’s D2C brand, which operates under his company Maneuver Marketing, is that it sells health supplements and has a product catalog of less than 10 products. It’s also been net profitable since its second year of operations.

Still, Qiu divulged how he was able to bootstrap and make money. Here are some insights:

• Slow and steady: Qiu didn’t want to be beholden to external pressures early in the journey of starting this business. So he decided to raise his own capital by running marketing training programs for SMEs in the education and real estate sectors through a firm called Growth Tribe.
• A different take: Being bootstrapped instilled a financial discipline in the D2C company, which is focused on first-order profits and healthy unit economics. Plus, with health supplements, there’s potentially a recurring element to customer purchases – kind of like a SaaS platform.
• Not all sunshine: The brand’s journey hasn’t always been smooth sailing. It evolved from a marketing and business consultancy firm to a D2C company, which was a “more drastic” change than expected, leading to staff departures. Finding talent with D2C expertise in Singapore has also been challenging, made tougher by the firm not being able to offer the outsized salary packages that VC-backed competitors could afford.

A strong Q2 for JD

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