More significantly, brands are starting festive creator campaigns earlier and deploying creators across discovery, consideration and conversion rather than treating influencer marketing only as a festive awareness tool.
Indian D2C brands are putting a larger share of their marketing budgets behind creators, but the money is increasingly being tied to sales, customer acquisition and reusable content as influencer fees climb and brands scrutinise returns more closely.
At accessories brand Miraggio, creators now account for around 25% of the company’s overall marketing budget. Travel and luggage brand Escape Plan puts the share at about 10-15%. At the wider industry level, ClanConnect Co-founder and CEO Sagar Pushp said influencers can account for a minimum of 40-50% of the digital marketing mix for many online-first D2C brands.
The figures are not directly comparable because Miraggio and Escape Plan are referring to overall marketing budgets, while ClanConnect is referring specifically to digital marketing spend. But together they point to a larger reallocation underway in D2C marketing, with creator budgets moving beyond awareness-led campaigns and deeper into product discovery, content creation and conversion.
Miraggio Founder and CEO Mohit Jain said the company has increased creator investment over the past 12-18 months as creators have become more important to fashion discovery. The brand is also moving beyond one-off posts and looking at longer-term creator partnerships.
“Fashion is ultimately about seeing how something fits into your own life,” Jain said, adding that a handbag can look different when a consumer sees a creator styling it for work, travel or an evening out rather than only in a campaign image.
Miraggio maintains a broad creator mix rather than allocating purely by follower count, looking at aesthetic, audience, credibility and the creator’s ability to tell a story around the product. Jain said the company has seen particularly strong value in micro and mid-sized creators, where relationships with audiences can be more personal.
That shift is also showing up in how the brand measures returns. Around 30% of Miraggio’s creator activity is now measured against sales, ROAS, CAC or other performance metrics, up from about 15% earlier. Its performance-led creator campaigns deliver an average customer acquisition cost of ₹900 and a ROAS of 3.5
At the same time, the company is not treating creators as a substitute for performance advertising. Jain said Miraggio’s performance marketing remains Meta-heavy, while creator activity plays a different role in creating desire and discovery.
“Google captures intent. Creators can create the desire in the first place,” he said. The company does not do significant marketplace advertising.
Escape Plan is taking a similar approach but with a smaller share of its marketing pool. Co-founder and CEO Abhinav Pathak said roughly 10-15% of the brand’s marketing budget currently goes towards creators and influencer-led work, with the share increasing over the past year.
For Escape Plan, creators function more as a demonstration channel than a volume channel. Luggage is a considered purchase, Pathak said, and consumers want to see how a product opens, packs, rolls and performs on an actual trip, something static advertising may not communicate as effectively.
The brand’s creator mix is heavily tilted towards smaller creators. For every ten units of creator spend, roughly one goes to celebrities, two to three go to macro creators, while the clear majority goes to micro and nano creators. Within this pool, user-generated content, or UGC, is the single largest and fastest-growing component.
“We would rather work with fifteen creators who genuinely travel than one creator who simply has scale,” Pathak said. The shift, he added, is from reach to relevance, particularly for travel and design audiences already in a consideration mindset.
Creator inflation, however, is beginning to reshape the economics. Pathak said average creator fees have risen well over 30-40% in the last two years, and in some cohorts they have increased faster than the returns generated.
The issue, he said, is not simply the absolute fee but that the cost of a single post has risen while feeds have become more crowded and the shelf life of content has shortened.
As a result, brands are increasingly moving away from one-off transactional posts towards longer-term relationships, affiliate models and performance-linked components. Pathak described it less as a move towards cheaper creators and more as a move away from “renting attention for a single post” towards building repeat relationships with creators who understand the product.
ClanConnect’s Pushp said the allocation can be even more aggressive for online-first businesses, where most marketing spend is already digital. In many cases, influencers account for at least 40-50% of the digital marketing mix, he said, up meaningfully from a year ago.
He cited one eyewear brand working with ClanConnect that typically spends around ₹10 lakh a month on influencer marketing, scaling up significantly during major campaigns. Another beauty and skincare brand spends around ₹6.8 lakh a month.
The broader reallocation is also visible on the agency side. Ajay Kulkarni, Business Head at Barcode Entertainment, said the bigger story is not necessarily brands adding significantly more money to total marketing budgets but reallocating existing spends amid global economic headwinds.
“We’re actually seeing money move from traditional performance and celebrity budgets into the creator ecosystems,” Kulkarni said.
He argued that a creator can increasingly deliver multiple functions simultaneously, including trust, audience, storytelling and conversion. As a result, brands are moving from simply buying an influencer’s reach to using creators across the top, middle and bottom of the marketing funnel.
Kulkarni avoided putting a single inflation number across creator tiers, saying rates vary sharply by category, engagement, content quality and usage rights. The sharpest pricing pressure is at the macro and celebrity end, where demand is concentrated, while deeper supply keeps micro-creator pricing relatively competitive.
More importantly, he said, creator fees are no longer the only major cost. Usage rights, whitelisting and paid amplification can add substantially to what brands ultimately spend on creator-led advertising.
The next leg of growth is expected to be visible during the festive season. Kulkarni said creator economy spending during the festive period has been estimated at around ₹700 crore, with spends expected to grow 10-20% year on year.
At the individual brand level, he expects creator budgets during the festive period to be 20-30% higher than regular months.
For D2C brands, the creator economy is therefore becoming less about buying reach and more about allocating capital across a mix of brand-building, content production and measurable acquisition. The share of the budget is rising, but so is the pressure on creators to prove that influence can travel further down the funnel.
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First Published on August 31, 2026, 09:00:32 IST
