One stack, not three silos: How Stelcore’s leaders want Indian brands to go global
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One stack, not three silos: How Stelcore’s leaders want Indian brands to go global At TechSparks 2026, Stelcore’s Bharat Mandot, Percy Avari and Navin Mistry explained how brands can turn compliance, tech and supply chain into one growth engine. Selling abroad once meant stitching together a marketplace, a freight partner, and a compliance consultant, and hoping the pieces held. For India’s next wave of brands, that patchwork is giving way to one connected commerce stack. That shift was the focus of a session at TechSparks 2026, YourStory’s flagship event. Navin Mistry, Strategic Partner, Stelcore Commerce, was speaking with Bharat Mandot, Founder & Chairman, Stelcore Group, and Percy Avari, Co-Founder, Stelcore Supply Chain, about how technology, trade and supply chain can work as a single layer. Mistry kept the conversation informal, with the aim of giving D2C founders a clear sense of the integration layers, process layers, and mindset needed to build a brand in India or beyond. Why silos hold brands back Mandot started Stelcore in 2011 as a management consultancy. The business turned to compliance in 2016, when Amazon began taking Indian sellers global and merchants needed help making their products compliant. Today the group covers compliance, trade enablement, and payments across 14 countries. Avari, who has spent 35 years in logistics, including 29 years at Aramex, said the old model was the problem. What he saw over those decades, he said, was that “commerce, technology, and logistics were operating in silos”. Avari added that the goal now is to bring all three into one ecosystem, so Indian brands can go cross-border in an effortless, intelligent and compliant way. Prove demand, then fix compliance Asked how a founder should sequence the journey, Mandot put the customer first. “Customer acceptance is the most important part,” he said. A brand can test through a marketplace or even social channels, then bring in compliance, logistics and payments once buyers keep returning. He advised making only the top-selling products compliant at the start, since certifying an entire catalog pushes up launch costs. Mandot also pointed to inventory placement as a growth challenge. The Middle East can be served within a day, while the US is far larger, so stock must be spread across locations. His advice on scale was patient: win one country, build loyalty and healthy margins, and only then replicate the model in the next. Avoiding the first-shipment trap Avari said compliance has eased considerably over the past decade, but destination rules still catch new exporters out. Many first shipments, he noted, get stuck at foreign customs because founders skipped the homework. Stelcore Supply Chain now builds this knowledge into its technology, so a seller is warned about required documents while creating a shipment. “If you don’t look at all three together, you cannot grow your brand in a profitable way,” he said. Mandot described two tools for founders. One is a compliance assessment that shows the rules for a category across several countries in minutes. The other is an order management system linking warehouses and last-mile partners across countries, so no brand depends on a single facility. From dropship to forward fulfillment On when to move beyond third-party fulfillment, Avari said most brands begin with dropshipping, with 85-90 % of orders in year one. Demand data then shows which SKUs deserve forward fulfillment from regional hubs such as Dubai. By years two or three, he said, dropshipping can fall to 10-20 % of orders. Mistry added that no single formula fits every brand: “There’s no universal answer, but it’s a mixture of both.” The MSME opportunity Avari called small businesses the backbone of Indian exports and said Stelcore aims to move 25,000 MSMEs from domestic to cross-border trade within five years. Mandot expects export opportunity to grow roughly tenfold in three to five years, helped by government support. For tech founders, his advice was simple: build “the product for which we are willing to pay”. From the audience Audience questions covered customer acquisition and delivery economics. Mandot said Stelcore acts as an introductory partner, connecting brands with marketplace teams to gauge market potential before they commit. Avari said unit economics improve over two to three years as brands shift from dropshipping to regional forward fulfillment, though a long tail of SKUs will always stay on dropship. He suggested holding inventory in free trade zones across a few regions to keep costs in check. The takeaway from Stelcore’s leaders was that cross-border growth depends less on any single tool than on aligning compliance, technology, and logistics from the first order.
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