The most dangerous thing a founder can do as their business grows is stop thinking like a customer. Vivek Manoharan, founder and CEO of Ethnic Tree, has built his entire leadership philosophy around preventing exactly that.
Ethnic Tree is a direct-to-consumer Indian ethnic fashion brand serving buyers across India and the global Indian diaspora. Under Vivek Manoharan’s leadership, the brand has grown into a multi-platform operation — covering its own D2C website — while maintaining the customer-first clarity of a brand still in its formative years.
What does thinking like a customer mean in practice for a CEO running a fashion brand? For Vivek, it means several concrete things. It means personally reviewing how the mobile shopping experience performs before launching any paid campaign. It means writing — or closely overseeing — the product copy that a buyer in London or Toronto reads when she is deciding whether to trust the brand with her Diwali purchase. It means treating every friction point in the customer journey not as an operational problem, but as a brand problem.
A customer does not see your backend, your spreadsheets, or your team meetings. She sees your website, your emails, and the package that arrives at her door. Those are your brand. I try to see only what she sees – Vivek Manoharan
This philosophy has shaped how Ethnic Tree is organised as a business. Rather than separating marketing from operations, or brand from product, Vivek runs the business as an integrated whole — where every function is evaluated by the same question: does this serve the customer better?
The CEO’s approach to growth is equally deliberate. Ethnic Tree is not chasing vanity metrics. The brand’s expansion into new marketplaces is measured and sequenced — each new channel opened only when the brand experience can be maintained at the standard the brand has set for itself. The international expansion to 130+ countries through ethnictree.com was not a rushed global push but a methodical build of shipping infrastructure, localised trust signals, and diaspora-specific communication.
Vivek Manoharan is also forthright about the challenges of building in a competitive market with real resource constraints. The investment in mobile page speed optimisation, the rigorous approach to conversion rate improvement, the careful management of Meta ad spend — these are not the actions of a CEO chasing scale at any cost. They are the actions of a leader who understands that in fashion, trust is built slowly and lost quickly.
As Ethnic Tree continues to grow, Vivek Manoharan’s leadership model offers a clear framework for other founders in the D2C space: put the customer at the centre of every decision, build the infrastructure to serve them well, and resist the temptation to grow faster than your brand can sustain.
Discover Ethnic Tree story at ethnictree.com